American photography, 1890-1965 :

from the Museum of Modern Art, New

York
Peter Galassi, with an essay by Luc Sante

Author
Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)

Date
1995

Publisher

The Museum of Modern Art: Distributed

by H.N. Abrams

ISBN
0870701401, 087070141X, 0810961431

Exhibition URL

www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/238

The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition history—

from our founding in 1929 to the present—is
available online. It includes exhibition catalogues,
primary documents, installation views, and an
index of participating artists.

MoMA © 2017 The Museum of Modern Art

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The
Erna and
Victor
Hasselblad
Photography
Study
Center

95.507
~
American Photography
1890-1965
Robert Frank. U.S. Number 61, Texas. 1955
 American Photography
1890-1965
FROM THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
NEW YORK

PETER GALASSI

with an essay by
LUC SANTE

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Distributed by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York
Published on the occasion of the exhibition American Photography1890-1965 from The Museum of Modern Art, New York,
organized under the auspices of The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art by Peter Galassi, Chief
Curator, Department of Photography.

Tour of the Exhibition

Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek. Preussischer Kulturbesitz

April 24-June 12, 1995

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

July 3-September 1, 1995

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

October 5-November 26, 1995

Hasselblad Center, Goteborg, Sweden

January 6-February 25, 1996

Musee National d'Art Moderne —Centre de Creation Industrielle, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
March 19-May 31, 1996

IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez, Valencia

June 22-September 15, 1996

Victoria & Albert Museum, London

November 14, 1996-January 26, 1997

Produced by the Department of Publications

The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Osa Brown, Director of Publications
Edited by Harriet Schoenholz Bee
Designed by Jody Hanson
Production by Amanda W. Freymann
Composition by U.S. Lithograph, typographers, New York
Tritone separations by Robert J. Hennessey
Printed and bound by Amilcare Pizzi, S.p.A., Milan

Copyright © 1995 by The Museum of Modern Art, New York

All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 94-73385
ISBN 0-87070-140-1 (clothbound, MoMA, T&H)
ISBN 0-87070-141-x (paperbound, MoMA)
ISBN 0-8109-6143-1 (clothbound, Abrams)

Published by The Museum of Modern Art

11 West 53 Street, New York, New York 10019

Clothbound edition distributed in the United States and Canada by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York,
A Times Mirror Company

Clothbound edition distributed outside the United States and Canada by Thames & Hudson, Ltd., London

Printed in Italy

Cover: Berenice Abbott. Zito's Bakery, BleeckerStreet, New York.1937. Gelatin-silver print. 9V2x yV\(,"(24.1 x 18.9 cm).
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Given anonymously
Contents

Foreword 7

Preface 9

Two Stories by Peter Galassi 10

Notes 40

List of Illustrations to the Text 41

A Nation of Pictures by Luc Sante 42

Notes 55

Plates 56

List of Plates 248

Index 254
Foreword

From its founding in 1929, The Museum of Modern Art has brought an international perspec
tive to its collection and programs in New York and, in turn, has addressed its work to a broad,
international audience. This book is published on the occasion of an exhibition selected from
the Museum's collection, which has been organized for tour in Europe by the Museum's Inter
national Program.
The Museum of Modern Art was the first art museum anywhere to establish, in 1940, a
curatorial department specifically dedicated to the art of photography. Happily, since then,
museums around the world have recognized photography as an art to be collected, studied, and
exhibited. In Europe, interest in photography has burgeoned over the past two decades. Lead
ing museums, several of which are participating in the tour of the exhibition, have developed
important programs and many younger European institutions have contributed to a greater
appreciation and understanding of photography. Among the latter is the Hasselblad Center in
Goteborg, Sweden, created in 1989 by The Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation. Estab
lished to support photography and scientific research, the Foundation in 1984 endowed The
Erna and Victor Hasselblad Photography Study Center at The Museum of Modern Art, which
serves hundreds of scholars, curators, and students each year. The close relationship between
the Museum and the Foundation helped to initiate the present book and exhibition.
The Museum's photography collection is international in scope and ranges from the
1840s to the present. Not surprisingly, it is particularly strong in twentieth-century American
work. The exhibition accompanied by this book offers the very welcome opportunity to share
this rich aspect of our holdings with a large European public. We hope that visitors to the exhi
bition on its extensive tour and readers of the book everywhere will draw from them pleasure,
stimulation, and some discoveries.
I wish to express our deep appreciation to the participating institutions that have made
this tour possible and to Elizabeth Streibert, acting director of the Museum's International
Program, for so ably organizing the tour. We are also most grateful to the members of The
International Council of The Museum of Modern Art, who generously support the Inter
national Program.

Richard E. Oldenburg
Director
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
December 1994
Preface

This book surveys three-quarters of a century of American photography, from 1890 to 1965, as
it is represented in the Museum's collection. (To be precise, the earliest picture was made by
Jacob Riis in about 1888; the latest, by Diane Arbus in 1967.) The book does not include pho
tographs made by foreigners on visits to the United States or by Americans (notably Man Ray)
who did their principal work as expatriates. It does include pictures by foreign-born photogra
phers who came to the United States and stayed; indeed it could hardly exist without them.
Included also is the work of Tina Modotti, an Italian working in Mexico under the decisive
influence of an American, Edward Weston.
The period of American photography surveyed here is marked as much by breadth and
variety as by the depth and originality of its highest achievements. For every major figure there
are several others whose distinctive work demands notice. Beyond this roster of distinguished
photographers is the lively contribution of unnumbered amateurs, professionals, enthusiasts,
and journeymen whose circumstances and motives are now as dimly known as they have been
varied. In the selection of the pictures an attempt has been made to represent the importance of
the leading photographers, and to suggest the evolution of long careers. The ultimate criterion,
however, has been to favor the collective vitality of the whole over the accomplishment of the
individual, no matter how impressive and influential.
The Museum's collection is a cumulative, continuing project to whose growth, care, and
usefulness a great number of people have contributed in many different ways. An invaluable
collective contribution has been made by photographers themselves, not even so much through
their gifts of pictures, extraordinarily generous as these have been, as through their responsive
ness to and encouragement of the Museum's work. Their contribution has been paralleled by
the support of the Museum's Committee on Photography, under the dedicated leadership of
its successive chairmen: David H. McAlpin, James Thrall Soby, Henry Allen Moe, Shirley C.
Burden, Mrs. Henry Ives Cobb, and John Parkinson III. The Committee's current vice-
chairmen, Robert B. Menschel and Paul F. Walter, also have played vital roles.
This book and the exhibition it accompanies, like all public expressions of the Museum's
programs, deeply depend upon the skill and dedication of the Museum's staff: the people who
care for, catalogue, frame, and hang the works of art, and the people who, in a large and cum
bersome institution, manage to make it run. In the case of this book I am particularly thankful
to Jody Hanson, who designed it; to Amanda Freymann and independent craftsman Robert J.
Hennessey, who are responsible for the extraordinary quality of its reproductions; to Harriet
Schoenholz Bee, who edited the text; and to Thomas W. Collins, Jr., the Beaumont and Nancy
Newhall Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Photography, and Jennifer Fiese, my assistant,
who did practically everything else. I am grateful also to Fuc Sante, whose essay, like photogra
phy itself, looks outward.

Peter Galassi 9
Two Stories

PETER GALASSI

I
In August 195 1 The Museum of Modern Art opened Forgotten Photographers, an exhibition of
more than one hundred photographs from the Library of Congress, where they had been reg
istered to protect copyright. In other words, the pictures had been made not as works of art but
to serve a variety of practical, often commercial, purposes. Selected by the photographer
Edward Steichen, then director of the Museum's Department of Photography, the exhibition
represented more than fifty photographers, including Edward S. Curtis, Erwin E. Smith,
Frances Benjamin Johnston, and Darius Kinsey (see pages 60, 61, 67, and 75). Introducing the
exhibition, Steichen wrote: "Included in this selection there are remarkably fine examples of
photography, some of them forecasting various phases of contemporary photography."
All but a few of the photographs in the exhibition had been made at the turn of the cen
tury, that is, precisely when Steichen himself had begun to make photographs. His own early
work, however, was very different from the work in the exhibition. While still a teenager
Steichen had styled himself an aesthete (page 82), and by 1902, at the age of twenty-three, he
had joined Alfred Stieglitz and others in founding the Photo-Secession, a small, sophisticated
group determined to claim the status of high art for photography. Modeling their work on the
fashionable paintings of James McNeill WEistler and his epigones, members of the group pro
duced pictures that could not be mistaken for anything but works of art (see pages 81-93).
Through exhibitions, manifestos, and their luxurious journal, Camera Work, the Photo-
Secessionists also promulgated the exclusivity of their mission. If some photographs were to
deserve the status of high art it was essential that others should not, those others being just the
sort of ordinary photographs that Steichen was to exhibit half a century later in Forgotten
Photographers.
Thus the emergence of a high-art tradition created a rift in American photography.
Taking that rift as its starting point, this book surveys the following three quarters of a century,
from 1890 tO 1965. Darius Kinsey.
Steichen's concern in Forgotten Photographers for a branch of historical photography so seif-Portrait. 1914
alien to his own early work is explained in part by his intervening career. By the 1920s he
already had shed the hothouse aesthetic of the Photo-Secession to embrace its virtual opposite.
In 1923 he became chief photographer for the publisher Conde Nast, and he soon defined an
imposing standard for the new field of commercial and fashion photography in the illustrated
magazines. The verve and worldly competence embodied in his self-portrait of 1929 (page 16)
could hardly be more remote from the fragile refinement he had projected in 1898. Before
arriving at The Museum of Modern Art in 1947, Steichen had worked as a photographer for 11
 the army in World War I and for the navy in World War II. If his 1951 exhibition proposed that
modern photography should not be understood narrowly — as the achievement of a self-
absorbed artistic elite — his own diverse career is the proof of that proposal.
After Forgotten Photographers closed, the photographers (and the exhibition) were
promptly forgotten again, for the simple reason that there was hardly anyone to remember
them. In 195 1 the Museums Department of Photography, the first such department in a
museum of art, was only eleven years old. There did not yet exist, as there does today, a broad
audience concerned with the history and art of photography or a community of institutions
devoted to that concern. As that audience and community grew and flourished in the decades
that followed, they adopted as established principles two central lessons embodied in Steichen's
exhibition, that photographers who had not presented themselves as artists nevertheless had
produced remarkably fine examples of photography" and that this work had forecast "various
phases of contemporary photography" — that it had played and continued to play a vital role in
the modern tradition of American photography.

The founding of the Photo-Secession marked the beginning of a continuous tradition of self
consciously artistic photography in the United States. Thereafter, thanks to the exhortations
and energies of Stieglitz and his associates, it was possible for a photographer to recognize
him- or herself as an artist, even if that recognition was shared by only a handful of intimates.
With this new identity came a sense of solidarity with others and a confidence that one's art had
a future as well as a past.
Thus the Photo-Secession also marked the beginning of a persistent estrangement
between artistic photography and all other kinds — professional, commercial, practical, ama
teur: vernacular (meaning native, common, and functional as opposed to foreign and aestheti
cally refined). This distinction, fundamental to American culture, had existed earlier in
photography; the truculence of Photo-Secession rhetoric — and the quality of its artistic
achievement transformed it into a schism. Consider the abyss that separates the cultivated
Edwardian persona of Steichen's friend and fellow Photo-Secessionist, Gertrude Kasebier
(page 13), from the can-do spirit of Darius Kinsey, whose self-portrait (page 10) brooks no dis
sent from his claim that he was ready to "take pictures every day in the year, rain or shine,
except on Sunday. Born in Iowa in 1852 and raised in Colorado Territory, Kasebier was no
less a child of the frontier than was Kinsey, and her resourcefulness as an artist was less remote
from Kinsey's pragmatic professionalism than Stieglitz would have liked to admit. By the first
decade of the twentieth century, however, the two occupied opposing sides of a cultural divide.
That divide provides the organizing principle under which the photographs here have
been selected and organized. Broadly speaking, groupings of photographs conceived as works
of high art alternate with groupings of pictures made to serve a myriad of other motives. If fol
lowed blindly, this simple scheme would impose many a Solomon's choice because the rela
tionship between photography s vernacular and high-art traditions involved exchange as well
as opposition. It is the central hypothesis of this book, however, that the lasting contentions
created by the divide, as well as the animating sparks that leapt across it, propelled the ceaseless
renewal of modern American photography.
 In 1890 photography was half a century old but was only just then achieving the ease and ubiq
uity that we now regard as among its most essential attributes. The key technical advance was
the dry-plate negative, so named because before it was invented each negative was exposed and
developed while still wet with fresh emulsion. This meant that the photographer was obliged to
transport the darkroom to the site of the photograph; the dry plate freed the photographer
from the darkroom and the camera from the tripod. The result was that for the first time a
2 photograph could be made anywhere, of anything, by anybody.
The crucial term here is the last. Before the late 1880s, the overwhelming majority of pho
tographs had been made by paid professionals. By 1890 anyone could do it. The most celebrated
instance of the radical new availability of photography was the introduction, in 1888, of the
Kodak No. 1, the first mass-produced snapshot camera. In fact, the army of amateurs recording
family outings and newborn babies represented only one part of the vast expansion of photog
raphy's applications and practitioners. Between the untutored snapshooter and the studio por
traitist, with his painted backgrounds and overstuffed chairs, there burgeoned an unclassifiably
heterogeneous multiplicity of people who made photographs. The diversity of motive, training,
and outlook of photography's new practitioners yielded a sprawling diversity of new pictures.
The journalist Jacob Riis, for example, enlisted photography in a project of social reform
that he had conceived without reference to photography (page 73). The teacher Lewis W. Hine
first made photographs as an aid to classroom pedagogy, then for the National Child Labor
Committee (page 74). Neither had set out to be a photographer, and neither followed the stan
dards or motives of other photographers. Within the limitations of photographic technology,
their pictures were formed by the task at hand and by the attempt of an individual to master it.
To compare the cold eye of Riis to the animating affection of Hine's regard for his subjects is to
recognize photography's capacity not only to get the job done but to mold its evidence to the
shape of a singular sensibility.
Just as photographs were becoming radically easier to make, they were also becoming
radically easier to disseminate to larger and larger audiences. Since the invention of the medium
in the 1830s, efforts had been made to translate the chemical photographic image into printer's
ink and to do so mechanically, that is, without the intervention of the human hand. At last, in
the 1890s photomechanical reproduction began to become practical and economic on a signif
icant scale, and photographs, rather than hand engravings after photographs, began to appear
with some frequency in the printed press. The results at first were crude, and it was not until
the 1920s that the photomechanical revolution finally triumphed over handmade illustration.
But the ultimate consequences were profound, because it became possible to multiply photo
graphic images in vastly greater quantities and, still more important, to combine image and
text, and to disseminate the new whole to a growing mass audience.
Before World War I, professional photographers distributed their pictures as original
(chemical) prints to a limited, usually local, audience. Typical of such professionals were Kinsey,
who photographed the logging industry in the Pacific Northwest (page 75); Henry Hamilton
Bennett, who helped to promote the Wisconsin Dells as a vacation retreat (pages 58-59); and
William H. Rau, who pictured the scenic routes of the Lehigh Valley Railroad (page 64). In the
1920s and 1930s James Van Der Zee was working in the same way for a still smaller market in
Harlem, New York (page 128), but by then the photomechanical revolution had rendered such
a market antiquated. From the 1920s onward the typical professional worked for the large audi
ences created by the photomechanical revolution. Grancel Fitz's suave advertisements
(page 123), Margaret Bourke-White's polemical reportage (page 149), Weegee's daily dispatches
of mayhem and madness (pages 166 and 167), and Richard Avedon's brilliant encapsulations of
celebrity and chic (pages 229 and 230) all were made for the printed page. Even the fabled pho
tographic unit of the Farm Security Administration owed its existence to the photomechanical
revolution. It was only through the distribution of its photographs to newspapers and maga
zines that the government's alarm of rural draught and depression could reach a mass audience.
The growth of the fine-art movement in photography in the 1890s, leading to the still
more exclusive Photo-Secession in 1902, may be explained in part as an expression of the new
availability of photography. The membership of the pictorialist societies was swelled by ama
teurs whose enthusiasm hardened into genuine artistic ambition. Here, too, the photo
mechanical revolution played an important role, because it made possible the wide and rapid
diffusion of the new aesthetic. The 1887 edition of The American Annual of Photography included
fewer than half a dozen photographic illustrations. Ten years later the annual boasted more
than two hundred photomechanical reproductions, including thirteen illustrations to a single
article by Stieglitz. These reproductions brought an elite international movement to Steichen,
then a young lithographer's apprentice in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and to future Photo-
Secessionist Clarence H. White, a bookkeeper for a wholesale grocer in still more provincial
Newark, Ohio.
If the fine-art movement was in part an expression of the new availability of photography,
it was also a vigorous reaction against it. The name Photo-Secession is telling in itself.
Borrowed from the Vienna Secession, it announced a yearning for European sophistication.
But, unlike the European artists who were seceding from a moribund academic tradition, the
American photographers were attempting to establish a new academy by seceding from what
they regarded as the sprawling, undisciplined diversity of photography. This goal led the
Photo-Secessionists to elect as their enemies not only the casual amateur and the seasoned pro
fessional but also the accomplished amateur artist, for whom mastery of craft and artistic
achievement were all but interchangeable. To the high-minded ambitions of the Photo-
Secession such a compromise was intolerable.
The work served by this polemic was both cloistered and superb. Dominated by themes
of nature (including the nude) and domestic leisure (again including the nude, as well as the
 ubiquitous portrait of the fellow aesthete), pictorialist imagery is heavy with pious sentiment
and romantic metaphor. The prints favored chiaroscuro over precise detail and were executed
on platinum paper, prized for its rich tones and velvet surface, or in gum bichromate or other
elaborate processes that invited the intervention of the artist's hand. To justify their polemic, the
Photo-Secessionists enclosed themselves in an aesthetic ivory tower. Although the aesthetic
soon changed, the mood of withdrawal persisted for decades.
The pictorialist movement in Europe, with which the Photo-Secessionists had enjoyed a
clubbish solidarity, withered in the tower. In Europe, the irreverent modernism of the 1920s
and 1930s emerged virtually without debt to the pictorialist precedent, indeed often without
knowledge of it. In the United States, a very different modernist aesthetic began to form earlier
and largely did so, remarkably, under the aegis of Stieglitz's elite academy. By 1910 Stieglitz's
own work had become leaner (page 92), and by 1917 Charles Sheeler (pages 101 and 102) and
Paul Strand (page 99) had made photographs whose directness and spare graphic economy
swiftly relegated the Photo-Secessionist achievement to the past.
Beginning in 1908 the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue served
as the unlikely venue for the first New York exhibitions of Matisse, Picasso, Brancusi, and
Braque (page 97). The proximate cause and transatlantic link was the garrulous Steichen, often
in Europe and ready for anything. But Stieglitz was not known for blind acquiescence to the
enthusiasms of his friends. Nearly alone among the keepers of high American culture, he
unflinchingly embraced the new European art, whose brazen inventions offered a stark com
parison to the salon Symbolism he had championed a few years earlier.
In 1913, only a decade after he had founded Camera Work, Stieglitz advised aspiring
artists in photography "not to be ashamed to have their photographs look like photographs.
3 A smudge in 'gum' has less value from an aesthetic point of view than an ordinary tintype."
This was a rallying cry for what soon came to be called the "straight aesthetic." In 1917 Strand
wrote that photography "finds its raison d'etre, like all media, in a complete uniqueness of
means. This is an absolute unqualified objectivity. Unlike the other arts which are really anti-
photographic, this objectivity is of the very essence of photography, its contribution and at the
4 same time its limitation."
To call a photograph painterly, so recently the highest of compliments, soon became the
most withering of criticisms. In other words, although the relationship to painting had shifted
abruptly, advanced photographers remained preoccupied with it. Like many other modernist
pronouncements, the urgent rhetoric that announced the new purity of photography func
tioned principally as mutual encouragement to a small band of devotees, whose artistic status
was barely more secure in 1920 than it had been in 1900. Thus it is as wrong to dismiss their
rhetoric as hollow bombast as to accept it at face value.
Falling into the latter trap, many then and since have misinterpreted a palace revolution
for the discovery of photography's essence. One prominent continuity with the pictorialist past
was the virtual religion of craft entailed by the new aesthetic. The new craft standard required
a large negative, generally eight by ten inches, which could only be made by a view camera, a
bellows box mounted on a tripod. (An example is the camera atop a tall tripod in Kinsey's self-
portrait on page 10). The negative was printed by contact, meaning that it met the paper
directly, yielding a print of utmost precision and subtlety. This, however, was the same craft
method that thousands of ordinary professionals had used for decades. Moreover, when plat
inum paper was retired from the market in the mid- 1920s, the artist-photographers found
themselves using gelatin-silver paper — the same uniform, industrial product that, for example,
 Edward Steichen.
Self-Portrait with Photographic
Paraphernalia, New York. 1929

employees of New York City had used to survey the condition of Manhattan's sidewalks
(page 78). In compensation, the artists mustered all of their considerable skill to coax from this
mass-produced material an exquisite clarity of detail and a luxurious subtlety of tone, from bril
liant highlights to translucent shadows. Their prints were no less voluptuous than the ones that
had graced the pictorialist salons.
Nor did the straight aesthetic, for all its claims of objectivity, inspire a curiosity for new
subjects. The grit and social provocation of Strand's early street encounters with the poor
(page 99) receded from the vocabulary of modern artistic photography as suddenly as it had
appeared and did not return until more than a decade later. The sole new subject in the 1920s
was the machine, but it was never a machine in use, greasy, or in need of repair. Like Edward
Weston s shapely pepper (page 110), Strand's gleaming motion-picture camera (page 112) is the
faultless embodiment of a Platonic ideal, larger than life. As if to make up for a surfeit of
descriptive precision, the photographer's frame has contracted upon the exquisite specimen: the
bold modernist detail is also a retreat. Weston's companion Tina Modotti expressed her gen
uine proletarian sympathies within the same constricted, impersonal format (page 109).
Looking with admiration at the noble authority and daring innovations of the traditional
arts, and with wary condescension at the common vernacular, Strand, Sheeler, Stieglitz, and
Weston created the first distinctly American photographic style. Caught between those two
poles, their work is magnificent, even heroic, but it is also solemn and insular, withdrawn from
the anxieties and complexities of modern life. In the midst of the turmoil of the Depression,
Stieglitz photographed Rockefeller Center as an unpeopled citadel, from the high isolation of
his rooms in the Shelton Hotel (pages 118 and 119). Also unpeopled, as if not yet sullied by
original sin, is the pristine wilderness of Ansel Adams, whom Stieglitz took under his wing in
the 1930s (pages 117, 120, 121, and 186).
But the narrowness of modernist photography in America also enabled a gathering of
forces. The vernacular tradition was inventive because a panoply of practical challenges spawned
a multiplicity of unpredictable solutions; the artistic tradition was inventive because the impera
tive of modern art was to invent. Drawing on the collective momentum set in motion by that
imperative, the straight aesthetic flourished as it matured. The work of Stieglitz and Adams is
indeed insular, but it is also supple, beautifully alert to variation. After the mid- 1930s Weston
progressively expanded the scope of his art, both literally and metaphorically. The tightly framed
detail gave way to the broad vista (page 116); the natural landscape became populated with tele
phone poles, automobiles, and advertisements; and the earnest sobriety of his art was leavened
with humor and irony (page 153). Through the 1950s the modernist aesthetic welcomed and
nourished the distinctive sensibilities of an impressive roster of fresh recruits, among them Harry
Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Frederick Sommer, Eliot Porter, Minor White, and Paul Caponigro.

In opposing the self-conscious artist to the practical professional, it is easy to make the mistake of
crediting the artist with the comfort of a received tradition while reserving for the professional
the familiar image of American independence and resolve. The professionals at least were paid,
and they worked for an audience, which, after the advent of the magazines, could number in the
millions. Steichen became famous as well as rich at Vanity Fair, the tabloid genius Weegee,

Berenice Abbott.
Portrait of the Author as a
Young Woman, c. 1930

17
 while never rich, justifiably called himself "Weegee the Famous"; and Richard Avedon, at the
age of forty-three, was immortalized by Fred Astaire in Funny Face, a Hollywood musical.
Among the independent artists, only Stieglitz was wealthy. They worked almost entirely for
themselves and for a minuscule community of enthusiasts. It was not until the 1970s that an
artist-photographer, if lucky, could begin to count on print sales as a reliable source of income.
The United States is very large, and the community of true believers was very small.
Edward Weston (Carmel, California), Clarence John Laughlin (New Orleans, Louisiana),
Harry Callahan (Detroit, Michigan), Frederick Sommer (Prescott, Arizona), and Minor White
(Portland, Oregon) were a long way from Alfred Stieglitz in New York. In 1952, thirty-five
years after the demise of Camera Work, White (by then in Rochester, New York) launched the
journal's first worthy successor: Aperture. In the first issue, White and his collaborators
explained: Most of the generating ideas in photography now spread through personal contact.
5 Growth can be slow and hard when you are groping alone."
For half a century before Stieglitz's death in 1946, a pilgrimage to his lair had been an
obligatory rite of passage for the aspiring artist in photography. Even Walker Evans submitted to
this ritual. The last major figure to do so was Callahan. College dropout, clerk for the Chrysler
Corporation, and member of the sleepy Detroit Camera Club, Callahan wasted not a minute
after Ansel Adams showed his photographs on a visit to the Club in 194 1. "They completely
6 freed me, was Callahan's later remark, an understatement. By 1946, when the good sense of a
friend brought Callahan to teach at Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's Institute of Design in Chicago, the
work of this untutored provincial had rejuvenated the straight aesthetic with an improbable
admixture of a severe talent for perfection and an irrepressible taste for experiment. Three years
before encountering Moholy-Nagy, Callahan had mastered the art of multiple exposure

Ralph Steiner.
Self-Portrait. 1930
 Helen Levitt.
Walker Evans, New York. c. 1940

(page 182), a familiar technique of European modernism but rare to extinction in the American
tradition. At just the same time, Sommer was melding the mutually incompatible precedents of
Edward Weston and Max Ernst into a highly original artistic alloy (pages 176 and 177).

In 1969, at the age of sixty-six, Walker Evans wrote: "Stieglitz was important enough and
strong enough to engender a whole field of reaction against himself, as well as a school inspired
by and following him. As example of the former, Stieglitz's veritably screaming aestheticism, his
personal artiness, veered many younger camera artists to the straight documentary style; to the
documentary approach for itself alone, not for journalism. Stieglitz's significance may have lain
in his resounding, crafty fight for recognition, as much as it lay in his oeuvre."
Evans himself was the most prominent among those who had reacted against Stieglitz.
Returning in 1928 from France, where he had tried and failed to transform his passion for
Flaubert and Baudelaire into a vocation for writing, Evans turned to photography. Like
Berenice Abbott's El at Columbus Avenue and Broadway (page 134), his earliest pictures speak
with the accent of advanced European work: the alert glance at life in the street (page 137) and
the graphic surprise of the view from above or below (page 135). Very soon Evans found his
true subject and voice, both of them drawn from the unvarnished American vernacular. From
Stieglitz, as Evans acknowledged, arose the tenacity of Evans's artistic identity and convictions;
from Evans arose a durable alternative to the tradition whose hermetic authority Stieglitz had
worked so hard to maintain.
Like Stieglitz — and like Steichen, whose flamboyant commercial success was repellent to
Stieglitz and Evans equally — Evans made the eight-by-ten-inch gelatin-silver contact print the
cornerstone of his aesthetic. Unlike the two older men, he was happy to recognize in this craft 19
 standard an affinity with the plainspoken photography of Kinsey (page 75) or Charles H.
Currier (page 70). To the workmanlike candor of their example, Evans brought the formal rigor
of modernism.
Evans s Penny Picture Display (page 144) is indeed a modernist picture— crisp, planar, as
resolutely self-contained as Sheeler's White Bam (page 101). But instead of reconfirming a time
less ideal, it engages a contemporary particular, rooted in history. Like much of Evans's work it
is a two-edged sword: simultaneously an emblem of the promise of equality and of the specter
of uniformity; the photographer takes no side. The picture is also an artistic manifesto, identi
fying Evans s enterprise with the unembellished functional work of the unnamed provincial
portraitist. Evans's own portraits (page 145) are like enlargements from the window of the
Savannah studio.
Like all the signal achievements of modern art, Evans's work is both complete in itself
and prodigious in its implications for the work of others. From its origins in the Photo-
Secession, artistically self-conscious photography had been founded on an opposition to the
banal realism of the vernacular. Embracing the vernacular as a model, Evans dispensed with the
sophisticated markers of craft that distinguished the artistic photograph from all others and
swept away the barrier that had encircled modernist photography's privileged subjects. For the
first time, the photograph-as-a-work-of-art could look exactly like any other photograph -and
it could show us anything, from a torn movie poster (page 133) to a graveyard overlooking a
steel mill (page 140). The photograph's claim of artistic distinction relied solely upon the clar
ity, intelligence, and originality of the photographer's perception. This profoundly radical idea,
more than the example of Evans's work itself, is the wellspring from which later flowed the vety
different work of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and Lee Friedlander. For
 Irving Penn.
Vogue Photographers. 1946
(left to right: Serge Balkin, Cecil
Beaton, George Piatt Lynes,
Constantin Joffe, the model
Dorian Leigh, Horst, John
Rawlings, Irving Penn, and Erwin
Blumenfeld)

them, neither the choice of what to look at, nor the way in which to look at it, nor the sense of
what it might mean to look at such a thing in such a way was dictated by a preordained rule.
This conception of photography also had profound implications for the photographic
past. If there was no distinction in principle between artistic and vernacular photography, then
there was no reason not to recognize artistic achievement in the vernacular work of the past —
in the work of amateurs such as Adam Clark Vroman (page 62), as well as professionals such as
Kinsey or Rau — or to extend that achievement in artistic work of the present. Presumably this
is what Steichen later meant when he wrote that his exhibition Forgotten Photographers included
"remarkably fine examples of photography, some of them forecasting various phases of con
temporary photography." By then Steichen was a curator, but most of the archaeological spade
work had been done by photographers. From the 1920s onward the discovery of the vernacu
lar past and present — of the work of Eugene Atget by Man Ray and Berenice Abbott in the
1920s, of Jacob Riis (page 73) by Alexander Alland in the 1940s, or of Ernest J. Bellocq
(page 71) by Lee Friedlander in the 1960s— has repeatedly enlivened the unfinished business of
photography's present.

Walker Evans was very lucky in the early enthusiasts and interpreters of his work, especially in
Lincoln Kirstein, through whose efforts the work was exhibited and published by the fledgling
Museum of Modern Art. Perhaps it could also be said that Evans was lucky in his association
with the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the government agency for which he worked
from 1935 to 1938, because in those years he made many of his best photographs. Nevertheless,
 Louis Faurer.
Untitled (Robert and
Mary Frank), c. 1948

despite Evans's efforts to renounce it, the FSA label fostered a tenacious misunderstanding of
his work and of the radical aesthetic it embodied.
The photographic unit of the FSA was a propaganda agency whose mission was to call
attention to the dire misfortune of America's farmers in the period of the Great Depression. At
various times between 1935 and 1942, it employed more than a few talented photographers,
including two outstanding artists: Evans and Dorothea Lange. Not since the 1850s in France,
when Napoleon III employed Gustave Le Gray and Charles Negre, had such superb photogra
phers of self-conscious artistic ambition worked for a government. The result in both cases was a
splendid if unstable concord between photography's artistic identity and its worldly applications.
Like Evans, Lange had achieved a mature outlook and style before joining the FSA (see
page 136), but the similarity ends there. Evans approached contemporary America as if he were
a disinterested historian sifting the shards of a vanished civilization. Lange was a passionate ide
alist, who aimed to provoke social change through her work. (She succeeded, for example, when
the publication of Migrant Mother [page 148] brought swift aid to the camp where the picture
had been made.) In the popular consciousness, and in the coffee shops where photographers
met, Lange 's definition prevailed. Over Evans's patient objections, the term "documentary pho
tography" entered the American dictionary as the label not of an artistic style but of a tool of
social advocacy.
In 1936, within a year of the creation of the FSA, Life magazine was launched. The new
field of magazine photojournalism eagerly nourished the budding confusion between photo
graphic fact and moral truth. In magazines of the postwar period the photography of social life
almost invariably promulgated a social ideal — by pointing at a problem in need of a solution (the
troubled youth of Gordon Parks 's Harlem Gang Wars [page 199]) or by applauding an exemplar
of the way things ought to be (the everyday heroism of W. Eugene Smith's "Country Doctor"
[page 196]). When Robert Frank's book The Americans appeared at the end of the 1950s (fron
tispiece and pages 215-217), the hostility it aroused may have had less to do with Frank's bitter
image of a drab and lonely country than with his refusal to adopt the prevailing optimism of arm
chair humanism. His book offered no succor to those who believed that all problems could be
8 solved, if only we cared enough. In this respect as in others, Frank was the successor of Evans.
22 The artistic legacy of Stieglitz, Strand, and Weston is easily traced through the work of
Adams, Callahan, Siskind, and White because the continuity of outlook is manifested as a
coherent evolution of style. The legacy of Evans is less readily grasped because the most potent
bequest of his documentary idea was the photographer's freedom from the superficial rhetoric
of a particular style. Like Evans, Frank extracted persuasive symbols from raw fact and did so by
fashioning a consistent poetic voice from the potent resource of an undisciplined vernacular.
The difference is that, between Evans's return to the United States in 1928 and Frank's arrival
from Switzerland two decades later, the vernacular had taken a dramatically different form. By
1950, thanks largely to the influence of the magazines, the standard of realism in American
photography had shifted from the steady gaze of the tripod-bound view camera to the fleeting
glance of the small hand-held camera. The mark of candor and authenticity was no longer the
seamless description of a stable object but the blur and grain of a picture caught on the run.
This photographic vocabulary, like picture journalism itself, had originated in Europe in
the work of such photographers as Erich Salomon, Martin Munkacsi, Andre Kertesz, and Henri
Cartier-Bresson. In the mid- 1930s Cartier-Bresson visited the United States, and Kertesz (page
158), John Gutmann (page 160) and Lisette Model (page 161) came to stay. At the same time
Evans and Helen Levitt (pages 137, 157, and 159) were translating the new vocabulary into a
local idiom, but it did not become the lingua franca of American photography until after the war.
Eventually, fed by the manic vitality of Weegee and his newspaper cohorts, it fostered an indis
putably American aesthetic: reckless, vulgar, just shy of anarchic. In the hands of such young
turks as William Klein (page 219), Louis Faurer (page 221), Leon Levinstein (page 223), and Ted
Croner (page 218), it was an aesthetic of the city, preoccupied with energy and speed.

O. Winston Link.
O. Winston Link and George
Thom with Part of the
Equipment Used in Making
Night Scenes with Synchronized
Flash. 1956

23
 Lee Friedlander.
Self-Portrait. 1965

The 1950s also witnessed a sea change in American photography, far more profound than a rev
olution in style. Half a century earlier, the Photo-Secessionists had set out to erect an unpassable
barrier between the unkempt diversity of applied photography and the cultivated singularity of
photography as a medium of art. Their mission required an obvious marker of difference, and
their work provided it. Already in the early 1920s, however, the gap had narrowed considerably.
Although aimed to seduce the consumer rather than the aesthete, the advertisements of Paul
Outerbridge and Grancel Fitz (pages 122 and 123) echo the voluptuous simplicity of contem
poraneous photographs by Stieglitz and Strand (pages 105 and 112). Just so, in the wake of
World War II, the private meditations of Harry Callahan, at once limpid and austere (pages 180
and 181), are first cousins to the equally rigorous photographs that Irving Penn made for mil
lions of readers of Vogue(pages 193-195). Moreover, among the tiny audience dedicated to seri
ous photography, Penn's artistic achievement was applauded as quickly and loudly as Callahan's.
Eventually, as the stylistic exchanges between aesthetic and applied photography contin
ued to multiply, the distinction between artist and professional was eroded. The rich collective
achievement of the 1950s owed a great deal to this new flexibility. One example is the contribu
tion of Dan Weiner, whose personal work (page 220) is stylistically continuous with the larger
body of excellent work he did for the magazines (page 198). Indeed the term "personal work"
arose at this time to distinguish between the two roles that a single photographer often played.
Robert Frank's The Americans was the most powerful and original body of work to emerge
from the fecund convergence of photography's high-art and vernacular traditions in the 1950s.
But the fierce independence of the book and its author also made it a bellwether for the diver
gence that rapidly ensued, inflecting the term "personal work" with a tone of derision for any
other kind. Robert Frank, Louis Faurer, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, and
Elliott Erwitt all did more than a little work on assignment, and all of them did their best and
most original work for themselves.
This was something new, and it profoundly changed American photography. From
William H. Rau at work for the railroad, James Van Der Zee at work for the residents of
Harlem, and Weegee at work for the tabloids, to W. Eugene Smith and Richard Avedon on
assignment for the magazines, the job had been more of an opportunity than a burden. For
three quarters of a century the marketplace had fed the resourcefulness and vitality of photog
raphy because it had provided the photographer with sufficient autonomy to meet and redefine
the professional standard by construing it as a rewarding challenge. Lange was repeatedly fired
by the FSA, and Smith repeatedly resigned from Life, but both repeatedly returned because the
artistic compensations of the work offset its bureaucratic frustrations. By the 1960s, especially
to new arrivals, the marketplace seemed increasingly alien, a domain of corporate authority
and homogenous committees, inhospitable to experiment and individual outlook. Even Penn
and Avedon, while continuing to make their art directors look brilliant, began to give more and
more time to independent projects. In other spheres of applied photography, too, fresh oppor-
tunity gradually settled into routine, as the demands of each assignment became increasingly
predictable. As young photographers of talent and desire progressively withdrew from the
engagement, the long productive interplay between photography's functional applications and
its high-art ambitions began to subside.
At about the same time, photography's autonomy from the traditional arts began to
erode. In comparison to Europe, advanced American photography had developed to a consid
erable degree in isolation. European avant-garde photography of the 1920s and 1930s had
lacked the orthodox authority of a Stieglitz and had enjoyed a far more fluid exchange with both
popular and high art. Among the ways this fluidity expressed itself was in the medium of pho
tographic collage, which was practiced enthusiastically by a wide range of artists, photogra
phers, illustrators, and propagandists. Such cut-and-paste abandon was rare in the United
States, where the experimental modernist and the steady professional both worked within the
four-square frame. This unspoken pact, a source of coherence amid diversity, was broken about
i960 by Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and other American artists, who bore no alle
giance to photographic traditions. These artists seized upon piles of yellowing newspapers and
magazines — full of photographs of movie stars, murderers, winners, and losers — as if they had
discovered a gold mine.
They had. Walker Evans in the 1930s (page 133), William Klein in the 1950s (page 219),
and a host of others had celebrated the same vital vernacular without revising their conception
of photography as an art of perception. Although Rauschenberg and Warhol both made pho
tographs, they turned to the vernacular not principally as a model for photographs of their own
but as a bottomless resource of raw material, and as a process for replicating, digesting, and
recombining its riches. In 1965 Evans's successors — Arbus, Winogrand, and Friedlander —
still had their best work ahead of them, which would again reinvigorate American photogra
phy's tradition of headlong engagement with the world of experience. Henceforth that tradition
coexisted, competed, and interacted with the tradition of Rauschenberg and Warhol, for whom
the world already had been photographed.

It is difficult to avoid noticing that the seventy-five years spanned by the photographs presented
here coincide precisely with the abbreviated American Century of economic and military might
and untrammeled self-confidence. It is difficult to avoid noticing also that the maturity of
American photography blossomed most fully just as self-doubt was beginning to take hold in
the nation's collective mentality. The photographs that close this book confront moral uncer
tainty with seasoned artistic authority. This might be regarded as an irony, but perhaps it is not.
Perhaps it is an embodiment of Judge Learned Hand's proposition that "the spirit of liberty is
the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.""
 II
In May 1929 Miss Lillie P. Bliss, Mrs. John D. (Abby Aldrich) Rockefeller, Jr., and Mrs.
Cornelius J. Sullivan joined with four others to form a committee to found The Museum of
Modern Art. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., then twenty-seven years old, was appointed director of the
Museum, which opened to the public in November. Over the summer the committee had
issued a brochure outlining its intention to present exhibitions and, ultimately, to acquire a col
lection of the best modern works of art," which naturally meant works in the traditional medi
ums of painting and sculpture. The prospectus also stated: "In time the Museum would
expand ... to include other phases of modern art."
This phrase disguised the young directors most radical ambitions for the new museum.
In a draft for the brochure Barr had written: "In time the Museum would probably expand
beyond the narrow limits of painting and sculpture in order to include departments devoted to
drawings, prints, and photography, typography, the arts of design in commerce and industry,
architecture (a collection of projets and maqnettes), stage designing, furniture and the decorative
10 arts. Not the least important collection might be th efilmotek, a library of films."
In 1929 many still regarded the work of Picasso and Matisse as alien or even ridiculous,
but enthusiasm for the new painting and sculpture was hardly unknown. Nor, as Barr himself
pointed out, was it unprecedented to extend that enthusiasm to modern mechanical mediums
such as film and photography. (His use of the word filmotek suggests a particular alertness to
European precedents, notably the comprehensive curriculum of the Bauhaus.) What was new
was the attempt to give this inclusive outlook a permanent institutional form, based in a collec
tion and founded on the conviction that, for all its boldness of innovation, modern art consti
tuted a coherent, unfolding tradition.
Despite the daunting challenge of creating a functioning museum from scratch, and
despite the primacy of the program for painting and sculpture, virtually every other aspect of
Barr's wide-ranging scheme soon began to take root in the Museum, at first through acquisi
tions and exhibitions, and eventually in the form of curatorial departments: Architecture
(1932), Film (1935), Industrial Design (1940), Photography (1940), and Dance and Theater
Design (1944). Today the Museum comprises six curatorial departments: Painting and Sculp
ture, Drawings, Prints and Illustrated Books, Architecture and Design, Film and Video, and
Photography.
In 1933 the Museum also inaugurated the Department of Circulating Exhibitions. Only
four years old, still without a collection to speak of, the institution thus announced an intention
to broadcast its programs, to develop a wide audience for modern art. Indeed, over the next two
decades many of the Museum's exhibitions, including a majority of its photography exhibitions,
traveled extensively. For example, between October 1939 and May 1941, at a fee of thirty dol
lars for a two-week showing, the exhibition Seven American Photographers toured seventeen
venues, including Kaufmann's Department Stores, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the College of
Mines and Metallurgy, El Paso, Texas; and The Darlington School, Rome, Georgia.

What follows here is an attempt to trace the development of the Museum's program in pho
11 tography, with little regard to the evolution of the institution as a whole. Thus the story told
here is both a limited and a distorted one because the single most significant characteristic of
the photography program is its presence in an art museum devoted broadly to modern visual
 culture. With that said, however, it needs saying also that each of the Museum's various pro
grams developed to a considerable degree in isolation, especially in the early years.
Barr's plan proposed that its various components were related one to another, but it did
not say just how. Indeed, it was to avoid a premature answer to that question that Barr opposed
a central curatorial administration in favor of independent departments, whose interrelation
ships could develop and change over time. Today, two generations later, the nature of those
interrelationships remains a subject of lively argument. At the outset of the Museum it was chal
lenging enough to build programs and collections that might serve to advance the argument,
without attempting to resolve it. What the Museum's programs most shared, beyond an often
fervent sense of mission, was the turmoil, frustration, and failure that inevitably accompanied
their triumphs and leaps of faith.
Since the turn of the century, thanks in part to Stieglitz and his associates, New York had
been the scene of considerable activity concerned with photography, including exhibitions, lec
12 tures, and criticism. Virtually all of this activity, however, was focused on new photography;
even work of the recent past rapidly disappeared from view. In a lecture of 1923 Paul Strand
lamented the fact. Praising Stieglitz's personal effort to collect and preserve the work of the
Photo-Secessionists and their European counterparts, Strand urged young photographers to
make use of Stieglitz's collection, "that is, use all this experiment, not to imitate but as a means
of clarifying their own work, of growing, as the painter who is also an artist can use his tradi
tion. Photographers have no other access to their tradition, to the experimental work of the
past. For whereas the painter may acquaint himself with the development of the medium, such
is not the case for the student-worker in photography. There is no place where you can see the
work of [David Octavius] Hill, [Clarence H.] White, [Gertrude] Kasebier, [Frank] Eugene,
13 Stieglitz, as well as the work of Europe, on permanent exhibition."
Strand's remarks defined the essential function that the Museum's photography program,
by fits and starts, eventually came to serve. Today the central aim of that program is to encour
age a vital dialogue between the experiments of the present and the achievements of the past.
Alfred Barr, himself an extraordinary curator and scholar, was adept at involving other
remarkable people in the work of the Museum. Preoccupied with developing exhibitions and
publications on painting and sculpture, and with the still more demanding task of forming a
collection, he made a place for photography largely by encouraging the contributions of others.
In the first two decades of the Museum the key participants were talented, energetic, diverse in
outlook, and few: Lincoln Kirstein, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, David H. McAlpin, Ansel
Adams, James Thrall Soby, and Edward Steichen.
The early organization of the Museum included the Advisory Committee, which seems
to have functioned much as President Roosevelt's kitchen cabinet soon would, allowing indi
viduals with no formal authority to play a variety of instrumental roles. Among its most active
initial members was the twenty-two-year-old Kirstein, who, while still an undergraduate, had
founded the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art (a harbinger of the Museum) and the
avant-garde literary journal Hound and Horn. The breathtaking range of Kirstein 's enthusiasms
included photography, and his early friendship and collaboration with Walker Evans were deci
sive for the young Museum. Kirstein's precocity is neatly summarized in Evans's recollection:
"This undergraduate was teaching me something about what I was doing — it was a typical
Kirstein switcheroo, all permeated with tremendous spirit and flash, dash, and a kind of seem
ing high jinks that covered a really penetrating intelligence. ... It was immensely helpful and
14 hilariously audacious."
 In 1932 Kirstein organized Murals byAmerican Painters and Photographers, the first exhibi
tion at the Museum to include photography. In 1933 (the same year that he altered the history
of ballet by bringing George Balanchine to the United States) he organized the first one-person
photography exhibition, Walker Evans: Photographs of Nineteenth Century Houses, a body of work
he had commissioned and which he donated to the Museum. Five years later, Kirstein was the
force behind the Museums publication of Evans's American Photographs, for which he wrote one
of modern art's exemplary pieces of contemporaneous interpretation. Although it accompanied
an exhibition, American Photographs was not a catalogue but a substantial book and the first of its
kind. Its excellent reproductions were presented neither as a portfolio of the photographer's
best work nor as illustrations to a text or theme but as a poetic whole. In the half century since,
books based on this model have been a vital medium of the art of photography, in many respects
more important than exhibitions.
Kirstein's role in photography at the Museum did not end in 1938. In 1965, for one
example among others, he gave to the Museum Frances Benjamin Johnston's splendid Hampton
Album of 168 platinum prints (see page 67), again writing for the book that accompanied its
exhibition. His earliest efforts were the most crucial, however, not merely because they intro
duced photography to the Museum but because they engaged contemporary work with a seri
ousness and adventurousness that have yet to be surpassed.
At the Museum, Kirstein was an inspired free lance; the quality of his contribution was in
part a function of his independence from bureaucratic responsibility. The prospect of a sus
tained program in photography had first arisen in 1935, when Barr hired Beaumont Newhall,
another scion of Harvard, to head the Museum library. The choice was a resourceful sleight of
hand. The Museum's trustees would not be prepared to pay the salary of a photography curator
for many years to come, but they agreed that a library was essential. Barr knew that Newhall,
virtually alone among trained art historians, had developed a deep interest in photography.
Although he remained in charge of the library until 194T devising its cataloguing system and
compiling meticulous bibliographies for Barr's ground-breaking publications, Newhall soon
had the opportunity to exercise that interest on an ambitious scale. In March 1937, at Barr's
invitation, he organized the exhibition Photography 1839-1937. Comprised of 841 objects, it was
the first attempt in a museum of art to trace the history of photography, not as a chronicle of
technical improvements but as the evolution of a new species of picture. The catalogue of the
exhibition served as the basis for Newhall 's book The History of Photography, which was pub
lished by the Museum in 1949 and remained the standard text for decades and which, two
editions later, is still in print.
Newhall did not learn for many years that he owed his great opportunity not only to Barr
but also to David H. McAlpin. An investment banker and amateur photographer, McAlpin had
conceived a deep interest in advanced photography after visiting Stieglitz's gallery, where he
formed a friendship with Georgia O'Keeffe as well as with Stieglitz. Linked to the Museum by
his Rockefeller relations, McAlpin had approached Barr with an offer of $5,000 to pay for a
major photography exhibition. The result was Newhall's ambitious historical survey.
Unlike most European museums, most museums in the United States have been created
and sustained by private individuals rather than by national or local governments. The list of
significant contributors to the Museum's photography programs and collection is by now very
long. Prominent on that list are photographers themselves, and not only for gifts of their own
work. (For example, the photograph by Stieglitz on page 97 is the gift of Sheeler; the Modotti
on page 107 is the gift of Weston; the Evans on page 144 is the gift of Willard Van Dyke.) In
 Jay Leyda.
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., New York.
1931-33

1967 Lee Friedlander undertook to establish The Ben Schultz Memorial Collection, persuading
twenty-three photographers to give the Museum a total of fifty-seven prints in memory of an
inspired picture editor at Time-Life. In 1979 Ansel and Virginia Adams endowed a permanent
staff position in the department, The Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellowship.
In the Museum's early years, however, its photography program was sustained by only a
handful of people. The budding collection was enriched by important gifts from Samuel M.
Kootz and Albert M. Bender and, most notably, James Thrall Soby, who in 1940 gave the
Museum more than one hundred photographs by Man Ray. Soby was just beginning an ex
traordinary career at the Museum, in which he eventually served as trustee, curator, adminis
trator, collector, organizer of exhibitions, and author of the publications that accompanied
them. Although most of his energies were devoted to painting and sculpture, his farsighted con
cern for photography, incorporating a lively enthusiasm for contemporary work, was deeply
influential.
But McAlpin was the mainstay. He volunteered to pay for exhibitions, acquisitions, and
even the stipend of $1,000 that accompanied the Museum's first (and, as it turned out, only)
Photographer's Fellowship, awarded to Helen Levitt in 1946. Along with Soby, he was a crucial
advocate for photography in the high councils of the Museum. Above all, he took the decisive
step that created the Department of Photography when he agreed to guarantee its initial oper
ating expenses. The importance of his role can be appreciated fully only in the light of the
Museum's policy that programs such as photography or film could exist at all only if they paid
for themselves, including their staff salaries. Although apparently not enforced rigorously, the
policy was still in place two decades after the founding of the Museum. Without McAlpin, Barr
and Newhall might have waited many years before they were able to transform a pattern of
sporadic achievement into a coherent program.
The Department of Photography, with Newhall as curator, was formally established in
December 1940. The Committee on Photography, formed to oversee the new department, was
 George Piatt Lynes.
Lincoln Kirstein. c. 1940

led by McAlpin, its first chairman, and Soby. Another key member was California photographer
Ansel Adams, the committee's vice-chairman.
Adams joined the committee at the urging of McAlpin, who offered to pay the expense of
bringing him to New York for six months to help get the department underway. The two had
met in 1936, when Adams was in New York for an exhibition of his work at Stieglitz's gallery. By
1939 their close friendship had blossomed into a bicoastal circle of photography enthusiasts,
which also included Beaumont and Nancy Newhall and Edward and Charis Weston. Thus the
formation of a professional curatorial program was also an intimate personal collaboration.
Throughout his life Adams was a tireless organizer, letter writer, and champion of causes,
and he undertook his role at the Museum with zeal. A devoted acolyte of Stieglitz, Adams
encouraged Newhall to set a high standard for photography as a medium of artistic expression.
Newhall's deepening allegiance to Stieglitz won little praise from the aloof old master, who dis
dained the Museum as a socially powerful latecomer to his cause, but it played a significant role
in the Museum's photography program. To celebrate the founding of the Department of
Photography, Adams and Newhall together organized Sixty Photographs: A Survey of Camera
15 Aesthetics, nearly half of which was drawn from the collection. In its spare selectivity and strin
gent modernism the exhibition offered a blunt contrast to the sprawling history exhibition
Newhall had organized three years earlier, and it announced a photography program in close
parallel to Barr's program for painting and sculpture.
In August 1942, less than two years after the founding of the Department of Photography,
Beaumont Newhall took a leave of absence from the Museum to serve as a photo-interpreter in
the Army Air Force. His wife Nancy, who had become an increasingly active informal collabo
rator in his work, served as acting curator until his return more than three years later. By 1947,
despite the disruption of World War II, the Newhalls had mounted major exhibitions of the work
of Paul Strand (1945), Edward Weston (1946), and Henri Cartier-Bresson (1947), each ac
companied by an exemplary catalogue; and James Johnson Sweeney, recently head of the
Department of Painting and Sculpture, had organized a large Stieglitz retrospective in 1947. An
ambitious plan for a survey of American photography since 1918 was abandoned for lack of funds,
but the Department of Photography regularly mounted general historical surveys from the col
lection, independently and in association with museumwide installations. In 1944 and 1946 the
Newhalls organized the first of what they planned as a series of group exhibitions comprised of
individual bodies of recent work. Among the photographers introduced to the public by these
exhibitions were Harry Callahan, Lisette Model, Arnold Newman, Aaron Siskind, and Frederick
Sommer. In other exhibitions the Newhalls had presented groups of photographs by Berenice
Abbott, Harold Edgerton, Helen Levitt, Man Ray, Eliot Porter, Ralph Steiner, and Brett Weston.
Like Barr, the Newhalls also worked hard to build the collection, and by 1945 the
Museum owned more than two thousand photographs. Given that there were hardly any pur
chase funds apart from McAlpin's contributions, this is an impressive figure. Gathering steam
just as the advent of the war was closing Europe, the collecting effort inevitably favored
American photography, including outstanding work by Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Evans,
Arnold Genthe, Lange, Modotti, Porter, Sheeler, Stieglitz, Strand, Weegee, Weston, and
Clarence H. White, as well as important nineteenth-century photographs by Mathew Brady,
Alexander Gardner, and Timothy O'Sullivan. Even so, the collection also included key works
by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Brassai, Cartier-Bresson, and Christian Schad as well as Soby's
superb Man Rays and a group of forty-one photographs by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy that
Beaumont Newhall had purchased in 1939 with funds provided by McAlpin. Viewed as a
whole, the Newhalls' program of exhibitions, publications, and acquisitions expressed both a
vigorous embrace of photographic modernism and a concerted effort to view photography in
historical perspective. The pride of place given to advanced contemporary work was consistent
with the Museum's central mission, and a particular attachment to the school of Stieglitz,
Weston, Strand, and Adams had not precluded an enthusiastic response to the very different
work of Cartier-Bresson and Moholy-Nagy.
This highly condensed summary represents only one of two narratives that were un
folding simultaneously. The other culminated in 1947 with the arrival of Edward Steichen as
director of the Department of Photography and with the departure of Newhall, who declined
to remain at the Museum under Steichen.

The entry of the United States into World War II, in December 1941, had a profound effect on
the Museum in general and on the Department of Photography in particular. Nancy Newhall
undertook her role as acting curator with energy and competence, but her authority was less
certain, as were her resources. The Museum's operating budget diminished by nearly twenty
percent in 1942, with severe consequences for those programs, including photography, that
were expected largely to pay for themselves. Finally, like many other public institutions, the
Museum vigorously applied itself to the war effort. Prominent among the new programs were
a number of exhibitions frankly designed to build national morale rather than to pursue aes
thetic inquiry. Photography was an obvious and effective conscript to this effort, beginning in
1940 with the exhibition, War Comes to the People,A Story Written with the Lens by Therese Bonney,
which was followed by Britain at War (1941) and Road to Victory (1942), an unapologetic patri
otic prophecy organized by Edward Steichen, acting as guest curator.
 The pressures of the war brought into open and eventually bitter conflict at the Museum
an unresolved contradiction latent in Barr's original plan, and indeed in modern photography
itself. By 1929 avant-garde photography, in full flower on both sides of the Atlantic, had earned
a place among the high achievements of modern art. Certainly Barr meant to recognize this
when he planned to include photography in the Museum. But he also meant something differ
ent and much broader. A product of the industrial revolution, photography had so profoundly
shaped modern life that the medium was an inevitable concern of the Museum, no matter
whether or in what particular cases it might be regarded as a medium of high art.
The intellectual framework of Barr's plan was capacious enough to accommodate these
divergent understandings of photography's role in modern culture. By the early 1940s, however,
they had hardened into opposing positions in a struggle over photography's place in the
Museum. The struggle was exacerbated by the precarious financial circumstance of the pho
tography program. Those who wished to broaden the program beyond what they regarded as
the cramped elitism of the Newhalls and Adams justified their populist proposals in part by
claiming an expectation of financial support from the photographic industry and from a large
audience of amateur photographers.
The first test of that expectation was the creation, in November 1943, of the Photog
raphy Center in an apartment building across the street from the Museum's garden. Beaumont
Newhall had been away for more than a year, and Willard Morgan, husband of photographer
Barbara Morgan, publisher of photography manuals, and contributing editor to Life magazine,
was appointed the first director of the Department of Photography. The Center was conceived

Willard Van Dyke.

Ansel Adams at 683 Brockhurst,
San Francisco. 1932
 Edward Weston.
Beaumont and Nancy Newhall,
Point Lobos, California. 1945

as an ambitions expansion of the photography program, including the first workable study cen
ter and plans for lectures and commissions to photographers, as well as exhibitions and publi
cations. In February 1944 Morgan organized The American Snapshot, an exhibition sponsored by
Eastman Kodak and drawn from the company's files of amateur photographs that had been sub
mitted to its competitions. Less an examination of the unpretentious snapshot than an adver
tisement for Kodak, the exhibition was regarded from all sides as a failure. The Photography
Center closed in the summer of 1944, the plans associated with it were abandoned, and Morgan
soon left the Museum.
In the light of this dispiriting episode, it is not surprising that Beaumont and Nancy
16 Newhall, corresponding with each other across the ocean, felt increasingly embattled. They
had the support of McAlpin and Barr, but McAlpin was serving in the navy and Barr had been
fired as the Museum's director in 1943 — a clear sign that the troubles of the Department of
Photography were only a small part of the young Museum's turbulent growing pains. (Barr did
not leave, however; he was named Director of Research and, in 1947, Director of Museum
Collections.) While the Newhalls construed the fragility of the photography program as an
incitement to fight all the more fiercely for the recognition of photography as a high art, the
trustees looked upon the same circumstance as requiring a substantial overhaul. Despite the bit
ter and embarrassing failure of the Photography Center, the view persisted that the best hopes
for the Department of Photography lay in the prospect of an expanded and more popular pro
gram that would attract support from the industry.
That view played a crucial role in the decision of the trustees to hire Edward Steichen as
 director of the Department of Photography. In 1945 Steichen had organized Power in the
Pacific, his second successful war exhibition at the Museum, and with the death of Stieglitz in
1946 he became a figure of unrivaled prestige in American photography. The notion that he
might take charge of photography at the Museum had first arisen late in 1944, not long after
Morgan's departure, and soon was linked to an ambitious scheme for expansion, very similar to
earlier plans for the Photography Center and equally dependent upon large contributions from
the industry. Exhibitions were to be installed in a Quonset hut (a semipermanent structure
developed by the navy during the war) to be erected in the Museum's garden, and the Museum
was to publish a quarterly journal on photography. Perhaps the most unrealistic aspect of the
scheme, whose principal promoter was Steichen's friend Tom Maloney, editor of U.S. Camera
magazine, was the idea that Newhall would remain under Steichen, to care for the collection
and organize historical exhibitions. Nevertheless, neither Newhall nor the Committee on
Photography was consulted, and in March 1946, soon after learning that the Steichen plan had
been adopted, Newhall submitted his resignation.
Steichen did not assume his new post until July 1947, more than a year after Newhall 's
departure. The work of the department had come nearly to a standstill, and for two years or
more Steichen's position was barely more secure than Newhall's had been. Steichen and
Maloney never did succeed in soliciting significant support from the industry; the Quonset hut
was sold at a loss; and the expansion plan remained unrealized. Eventually, however, Steichen
fulfilled the dreams of the populist camp beyond expectation.
Steichen had long since repudiated the ambitions he once had shared with Stieglitz, and he
increasingly viewed photography not as a medium of artistic expression but as a vehicle of mass
communication. In 1969, at the age of ninety, he recalled: "When I first became interested in
photography, I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognized as one of the
17 fine arts. Today I don't give a hoot in hell about that." Beginning with Road to Victory in 1941,
he had pursued a concept of exhibition that, like a layout in a vast, walk-in magazine, subordi
nated the individual photograph to the sweeping orchestral message of the whole. This concept
culminated in 1955 in The Family of Man, an enormous display comprised of 503 photographs
made by 273 photographers from 68 countries. Circulated overseas by the United States
18 Information Agency, the exhibition eventually was seen by more than seven million people.
By its very nature, The Family of Man was inhospitable to the distinctive sensibilities of
individual photographers and is thus a poor basis on which to judge Steichen's response to con
temporary work. Even such contemporary survey exhibitions as In and Out of Focus (1948) and
Always the YoungStrangers (1953), despite the absence of an overarching message, tended toward
homogeneity. In a steady program of smaller group exhibitions, however, each comprised of
individual bodies of work, Steichen demonstrated a keen eye for the diverse achievements of
photographers who were younger, often decades younger than he. His two favorites were Harry
Callahan and Robert Frank, the most original and influential American photographers of the
1950s, whose work he paired in one of his last exhibitions for the Museum, in 1962. The exhi
bition was to have been the sixth in a series titled Diogenes with a Camera until Frank, point
ing out that the ancient Greek seeker of truth had never made a photograph, insisted that the
exhibition bear the photographers' names. Under the Diogenes label Steichen had presented
the work of (among others) Edward Weston, Frederick Sommer, Eliot Porter, W. Eugene
Smith, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Aaron Siskind, Man Ray, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Walker
Evans, August Sander, and Bill Brandt. In a variety of other exhibitions, Steichen showed
enthusiasm for the photography of Richard Avedon, Roy DeCarava, Ted Croner, Louis Faurer,
 Edward Weston.
David H. McAlpin. 1941

Leon Levinstein, Lisette Model, and Irving Penn. In 1952 he purchased for the Museum two
photographs by Robert Rauschenberg (see page 210), the first two works by Rauschenberg in
any medium to enter any museum collection. Steichen was then seventy-three years old;
Rauschenberg was twenty-seven.
Steichen 's historical exhibitions were few and unrelated to one another, and the collection
grew very slowly, without apparent plan. The book that accompanied The Family of Man is still
in print and has sold far more copies than any other photography book, generating a purchase
fund that has since added hundreds of works to the collection; but it was one of only two books
that issued from the Department of Photography under his leadership. (The other was Steichen
the Photographer , the catalogue of a major retrospective organized in 1961.) As Steichen himself
would have wished, his tenure at the Museum is remembered principally for his grand thematic
displays, above all The Family of Man.
In 1955 the Department of Photography was only fifteen years old, and its road had been
a rocky one. The Family of Man brought to photography a scale of popular acclaim that hardly
could have been anticipated; doubtless it also brought to the department a degree of stability it
had not yet enjoyed. Nevertheless, the exhibition was an aberration. All curators select and
arrange works of art, and in The Family of Man Steichen did so brilliantly. His decisions, how
ever, were guided not by an attempt to recognize the photographers' individual achievements
or to explore the particular meanings that might arise from those achievements but by the need
to illustrate a moral message of his own conception: that the trials and joys of all people are
everywhere and always the same.
Like the nineteenth-century French architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, who did not hesi
tate to revise the medieval buildings he was charged to restore, Steichen at the Museum
approached photography not as a disinterested student but as the active participant he always 35
 had been. His work as curator is also the remarkable closing chapter of his long and extraordi
nary career as an artist. In both respects the photography program under his tenure evolved in
a continuous present, with little regard for the past. The choice between Newhall and Steichen
had turned out to be a choice not so much between a narrower and a broader view of photog
raphy as between the traditional functions of an art museum and a lively workshop of mass
communication under the direction of a passionate sensibility.
That the Museum could accommodate such a project was a sign of youth and eagerness
for a broad public, as well as of uncertainty about how to deal with the young medium of pho
tography. By the time Steichen retired in 1962, however, the Museum was no longer an upstart
experiment but a mature institution, and it was inevitable that the Department of Photography
eventually would return to the functions that Barr and Newhall had begun to establish more
than two decades earlier.

In 1949 Beaumont Newhall was appointed curator of the newly founded George Eastman
House in Rochester, New York, a museum devoted entirely to photography and film. Soon
there existed growing photography programs at several other American museums, notably The
Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Nevertheless, in 1962
a career as a curator of photography remained an unlikely aspiration, and The Museum of
Modern Art again turned to a photographer to lead its photography program.
John Szarkowski, who served as director of the Department of Photography from 1962 to
199 1, promptly distinguished his mission from Steichen's precedent by titling his first exhibition
of contemporary work Five Unrelated Photographers. (The five were Ken Heyman, George Krause,
Jerome Liebling, Minor White, and Garry Winogrand.) Four years later, in 1967, he organized
the exhibition New Documents, which elected Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and Lee Friedlander the
exemplary new talents of the 1960s. Among those who regard contemporary art as a horse race,
in which the curator s job is to bet on the winner, that exhibition is credited now as an excellent
wager. On the same basis, Szarkowski has been criticized for failing to appreciate the work of other
artists. The compliment and the criticism, each alone, fail to consider that a museum — especially
a museum concerned in part with contemporary art — ought to inspire both.
In Szarkowski s view, a useful debate hardly could proceed without an active review of the
individual achievements that had defined modern photography. Except for Steichen's survey of
his own career, in 1961, the Museum had not mounted a one-person exhibition since 1947.
Within the first decade of Szarkowski s tenure, the department organized major exhibitions of
the work of Andre Kertesz (1964), Dorothea Lange (1966), Henri Cartier-Bresson (1968),
Brassai (1968), Bill Brandt (1969), Eugene Atget (1969), Walker Evans (1971), Clarence H.
White (197 1), and Diane Arbus (1972). In the same period, the department also presented
twenty smaller exhibitions devoted to individual photographers, among them Berenice Abbott,
Paul Caponigro, Marie Cosindas, Bruce Davidson, Elliott Erwitt, Jacques-Henri Lartigue,
Ray K. Metzker, Duane Michals, Barbara Morgan, August Sander, Aaron Siskind, and
19 Jerry N. Uelsmann.
Under Szarkowski the department's programs for publications and acquisitions also flour
ished. Between 1964 and 1973 the Museum published more photography books and catalogues
than it had in the preceding thirty-five years. The landmark year for the collection was 1968,
when McAlpin gave to the Museum 324 photographs by Adams, Weston, Sheeler, Stieglitz, and
others; and when, after years of trying, Szarkowski succeeded in raising the money to purchase
 Bruce Davidson.
Edward Steichen. 1963

the collection of nearly five thousand photographs by Eugene Atget that Berenice Abbott had
heroically preserved for more than forty years.
The department was still very small, and a large proportion of its energy was devoted to
exhibitions. In a period when few other museums concerned themselves with photography, the
exhibition program played a vital role in building an active and critical audience for photogra
phy. But the steady growth of the collection was perhaps more important. No art collection that
aims to be comprehensive ever can be complete; indeed, one of the most valuable functions
of such a collection is that the works it contains point to the absence of others. During
Szarkowski's tenure the Museum's photography collection first achieved a density and variety
that enabled it to serve that function, and which made it an indispensable resource not only for the
Museum's own work but also for a diverse community of artists, curators, scholars, and students.
Upon the founding of the Department of Photography in 1940, the Museum had allo
cated space in which to exhibit photographs from the collection. The space was very small,
however, and apparently not always used for its designated purpose. It was not until 1964 that
a major expansion of the Museum finally created adequate permanent galleries in which to dis
play an historical survey of photography drawn from the collection. A farther expansion in 1984
more than doubled those galleries, which now accommodate some two hundred photographs.
Each new installation of these galleries, selected from a collection that now includes more than
twenty thousand prints, provides a provisional outline of photography's historical achievements.
In other words, the galleries are designed to offer not only works of outstanding quality but also
(to paraphrase Paul Strand) a coherent guide to past experiments — to a living tradition. 37
 As long as that tradition indeed remains alive and useful to each new generation, its con
tent and shape will remain a matter of debate. Szarkowski's work both nurtured the relevance of
the past to the unfolding present and clarified the terms of the debate.
In addition to many one-person exhibitions, Szarkowski organized a series of synthetic
exhibitions devoted to what he regarded as fundamental issues in the study of photography.
Among them were The Photo Essay (1965) and Once Invisible (1967), an examination of photo
graphic records of phenomena invisible to the unaided eye. The most important was The
Photographer's Eye (1964); the accompanying book appeared two years later. The exhibition pro
posed to see photography whole, as a distinct pictorial language, and to provide a basic set of
tools for analyzing it. The relative success or failure of this proposition is less significant than
the way in which it was framed.
The Photographer's Eye included a very wide range of pictures, among them anonymous
documents of the journeyman professional, magazine photojournalism, amateur snapshots,
and the masterpieces of self-conscious artists. In one sense, there was nothing new in this.
Beginning with Newhall's history exhibition of 1937, however, it had been common to divide
photography into expedient categories, based in turn on function, style, period, or formal
resemblance: press photography, scientific photography, documentary photography, abstract
photography, and so forth. As long as photography was divided in this way, it was not necessary
to consider how the various parts were related to one another. In Szarkowski's exhibition all of
the photographs, from the most ordinary vernacular to the most refined expression of cultivated
sensibility, were presented on a single plane.
This curatorial strategy has been mistaken for an answer, when in fact it was a question,
which has grown more rather than less interesting over the past thirty years. The nature of the
relationship between photography's vernacular and fine-art traditions is a splendid puzzle that
remains to be solved. As scholars and curators proliferate in the new university and museum
programs for photography, they find that puzzle at the center of their work.

In December 1941 The Museum of Modern Art presented an exhibition titled American
Photographs at $10, which included one picture by each of nine photographers: Berenice Abbott,
Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Helen Levitt, Arnold Newman, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (who had
come to the United States in 1937), Charles Sheeler, and Brett and Edward Weston. Printed in
editions of ten, the photographs were offered for sale, with all proceeds to go to the photogra
phers. By mid-January only fourteen of the ninety prints had been sold, including three to the
Museum itself and two to David H. McAlpin. In an apologetic letter to Moholy-Nagy, who had
sold one print, Beaumont Newhall wrote: "The sale was frankly an experiment. Perhaps we
shall have better success another year."
Today it would be inappropriate for the Museum to make such an effort to help photog
raphers to sell their work, precisely because there is no longer any need. In itself the failure of
Newhall's experiment explains the worthiness of the attempt, and it calls attention to how
greatly the circumstance of photography has changed. In the 1960s, when John Szarkowski
embarked on a rapid succession of one-person exhibitions, New York had never seen major ret
rospectives of the work of Kertesz, Lange, Brassai", or Brandt. Today, three decades later, the
many public institutions and the still more numerous commercial galleries that exhibit photog
raphy display collectively at any one time in New York alone such a vast array of pictures, new
and old, that even the most dedicated observer could not absorb all of it.
 Andre Kertesz.
John Szarkowski. 1963

In answer to the new audience that the Museum did so much to foster, its program for
contemporary photography has continued to grow. Over the past decade, in its New Photog
raphy series and in other exhibitions, the Museum has presented more than sixty individual
bodies of recent photographic work. The Museum also continues to introduce unfamiliar work
of the past; exhibitions devoted to the photography of Grancel Fitz (1986) and William H. Rau
(1987), for example, were the first in any museum. Nevertheless, in broad terms, the mission of
the Department of Photography is no longer so much to make photography known and to
encourage applause for it as to consider and clarify photography's diverse achievements and to
encourage a deeper understanding of them.
That mission addresses two principal challenges, one contemporary and one historical,
which are linked to each other. With the wide recognition of photography as an art has come an
erosion of the distinction between photography and other mediums. This welcome development
has contributed to the unprecedented complexity of contemporary art, in the forms it takes, in
the concerns it advances, and in the paths by which it has reached those forms and concerns. To
approach contemporary art as a homogenous whole is to forego in advance any hope of chart
ing its complexity. From the viewpoint of the present, the idea of photography as a distinct cat
egory of pictorial practice, with its own traditions, is at once inadequate and indispensable.
For those who find this contradiction frustrating, there is no help in turning back. It is
precisely the progressive flowering of photography in modern art that has widened our atten
tion to photography's obstreperous past. In consequence this book, like the collection upon
which it draws, contains many photographs that were not made as works of art. Uprooted from
the worldly functions that brought them into being, these pictures resist a settled role in their
new surroundings. Their presence in the Museum changes them but they in turn change the
Museum, introducing a healthy irritant to our notions of what art has been and can be. 39
Notes
1. From a Kinsey newspaper advertisement, reproduced in
Dave Bohn and Rodolfo Petschek, KinseyPhotographer(San
Francisco: Scrimshaw Press, 1975), vol. 1, p. 48.
2. The rich consequences of the advent of the dry plate
and of the photomechanical revolution are explored in
depth in John Szarkowski, Photography Until Now (New
York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1989), pp. 125-245.
3. Quoted in Mary Panzer, Philadelphia Naturalistic Photog
raphy 1865-1906 (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery,
1982), p. 22. Panzer's essay is valuable for its demonstration
of the degree of Stieglitz's hostility to serious amateur
artists whose ambitions he did not consider worthy of
his own. > Department of Photography.
4. Paul Strand, "Photography," reprinted from Seven Arts
in Camera Work, nos. 49-50 (June 1917), p. 3.
5. Aperture, vol. 1, no. 1 (1952), p. 3.
6. Harry Callahan, "Harry Callahan: A Life in Photog
raphy," in Keith F. Davis, ed., Harry Callahan (Kansas City,
Missouri: Hallmark Cards, 1981), p. 50. An edited tran
scription of a videotape interview at the Center for
Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona, this remarkable
text begins: "My parents were farmers."
7. In Louis Kronenberger, ed., Quality: Its Image in the Arts
(New York: Atheneum, 1969), p. 170.
8. The significance of the relationship between Evans's
work and Frank's is considered in Tod Papageorge, Walker
Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence (New Haven:
Yale University Art Gallery, 1981).
9. Speech given during the annual "I Am an American
Day" celebration in Central Park, New York City, May 21,
1944; variously reprinted thereafter, most recently in
Gerald Gunther, Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), p. 549.
10. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., "Chronicle of the Collection of
Painting and Sculpture," in Painting and Sculpture in The
Museum of Modern Art 1929-1967 (New York: The
Museum of Modern Art, 1977), p. 620.
11. On the general history of the Museum, see Russell
Lynes, GoodOld Modern:An Intimate Portrait of The Museum
of Modern Art (New York: Atheneum, 1973), and The
Museum of Modern Art , New York:The History and the Col
lection (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with
The Museum of Modern Art, 1984).
12. This activity is thoroughly documented in Maria
Morris Hambourg, "From 291 to The Museum of Modern
Art: Photography in New York, 1910-1937," in The New
Vision:PhotographyBetweenthe World Wars (New York: The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), pp. 3-63.
13. Paul Strand, "The Art Motive in Photography," lecture
delivered at the Clarence White School of Photography in
1923; in Vicki Goldberg, ed., Photographyin Print: Writings
from 1816 to the Present (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1981), p. 282. Stieglitz later gave his collection to The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
14. In Leslie Katz and Walker Evans, "Interview with
Walker Evans," Art in America, vol. 59, no. 2 (March-April
1971), p. 83.
15. The Bulletin of The Museum of Modern Art, vol. 8, no. 2
(December 1940-January 1941), served as a catalogue of
the exhibition and an announcement of the creation of the
Ascribing the breadth of Photography 1859-1957 in part
to the influence of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's expansive view of
photography as a universal language, Christopher Phillips
has suggested that Newhall had begun to turn toward
Stieglitz's narrower aesthetic by 1938. See his "The Judg
ment Seat of Photography," October, no. 22 (Fall 1982),
pp. 27-63.
16. Generous excerpts from these letters are provided in
Beaumont Newhall, Focus:Memoirs of a Life in Photography
(Boston: Bulfinch, 1993), pp. 111-34.
17. Quoted in ibid., p. 149, n. 32.
18. The exhibition and the circumstances under which it
arose are considered in John Szarkowski, "The Family of
Man," Studies in Modern Art, no. 4 (December 1994). One
of the traveling versions of the exhibition was installed per
manently at the Chateau de Clervaux, Luxembourg, in
1994. See Jean Back and Gabriel Bauret, eds., The Family
of Man: Temoignageset documents (Luxembourg: Editions
Artevents; Ministere des Affaires Culturelles, Centre Na
tional de l'Audiovisuel, 1994).
19. Several of these exhibitions, including the Clarence H.
White retrospective, were organized by Peter C. Bunnell,
who joined the staff as curator in 1966 and played a valu
able role in the Department of Photography until he left in
1972 to accept a professorship in the history of photogra
phy that David H. McAlpin had endowed at Princeton
University. With minor exceptions, the department had
spoken with a single curatorial voice from its founding in
1940 until 1958, when Edward Steichen hired Grace M.
Mayer as curator. Among Mayer's important contributions
was the first installation of the photography collection gal
leries on the occasion of the expansion of the Museum in
1964. Ever since her arrival in 1958 the department's pro
gram has been a collaborative effort.
 List of Illustrations to the Text
All works are in the collection of The Museum of Modern Page 23: O. Winston Link. 0. Winston Link and George
Art, New York. Thom with Part of the Equipment Used in Making Night
Sceneswith SynchronizedFlash. 1956. Gelatin-silver print,
printed 1976. 13 '/2 x 10 Ys" (34.2 x 27.5 cm). Purchase
Page 10: Darius Kinsey. Self-Portrait. 1914. Gelatin-silver
Page 24: Lee Friedlander. Self-Portrait. 1965. Gelatin-silver
/3s" print, printed by Jesse E. Ebert, 1962. if/s x io (33.3 x
/3s
13 print. 4 x 6 16" (11.1 x 17.2 cm). The Ben Schultz
26.2 cm). Purchase
Memorial Collection. Gift of the photographer
Page 13: Edward Steichen. Gertrude Kdsebier. c. 1907.
Page 29: Jay Leyda. Alfred H. Ban; Jr., New York. 1931-33.
/3s Platinum print. 4 x 5'A" (11 x 13.3 cm). Gift of Miss
/8" Gelatin-silver print. 4I/4 x 3 5 (12.1 x 9.2 cm). Gift of the
Mina Turner
photographer
Page 16: Edward Steichen. Self-Portrait with Photographic
Page 30: George Piatt Lynes. Lincoln Kirstein. c. 1940.
Paraphernalia, New York. 1929. Gelatin-silver print, cf/i x
/9i6 Gelatin-silver print. 9 x (24.2 x 19.6 cm). Gift of
7/s" 6 (24.2 x 17.5 cm). Gift of the photographer
Russell Lynes
Page 17: Berenice Abbott. Portrait of the Author as a Young
Page 32: Willard Van Dyke. Ansel Adams at 683 Brockhurst,
7/8 Woman, c. 1930. Gelatin-silver print. i2 x io'/s" (32.6 x
x"
A San Francisco.1932. Gelatin-silver print. 9V16x ~j (23.6 x
25.7 cm). Gift of Frances Keech in honor of Monroe
18.4 cm). Gift of the photographer
Wheeler
Page 33: Edward Weston. Beaumont and Nancy Newhall,
Page 18: Ralph Steiner. Self-Portrait. 1930. Gelatin-silver
/9i6 Point Lohos, California. 1945. Gelatin-silver print. 7 x
5/s" print. 9% 6 x 7 (24.2 x 19.3 cm). Gift of Samuel M.
9/i6" 9 (19,1 x 24.2 cm). Gift of Beaumont and Nancy
Kootz
Newhall
Page 79: Helen Levitt. Walker Evans, New York. c. 1940.
Page 33: Edward Weston. David H. McAlpin. 1941. Gelatin-
Gelatin-silver print, printed c. 1983. gVs x 6V16" (23.1 x
9/i6 silver print. 9'/a x 7 " (24.1 x 19.1 cm). Gift of David H.
16 cm). Gift of William H. Levitt
McAlpin
Page 20: Weegee (Arthur Fellig). Self-Portrait, c. 1940.
Page 57: Bruce Davidson. Edward Steichen. 1963. Gelatin-
5/s Gelatin-silver print. i2 x 9" (32 x 22.8 cm). Gift of the
silver print. 13 '/2 x yVs" (34.3 x 23.1 cm). Gift of the pho
photographer
tographer
Page 21: Irving Penn. VoguePhotographers. 1946. Gelatin-
Page 39: Andre Kertesz. John Szarkowski. 1963. Gelatin-
/3s" silver print. 7'/2 x 9 (19 x 23.7 cm). Gift of Monroe
3/ss" silver print, printed 1994. 8 x 6 (24.4 x 16.2 cm). Gift
Wheeler
of the Mission du Patrimoine Photographique, France
Page 22: Louis Faurer. Untitled (Robert and Mary Frank), (copyright Ministry of Culture, France)
5/i6" c. 1948. Gelatin-silver print. 9 '/i6 x i3 (22.9 x 33.7 cm).
Gift of the photographer
A Nation of Pictures

LUC SANTE

The Americans did not invent photography, and perhaps this has always rankled just a bit. After
all, the list of American discoveries during the nineteenth century is extraordinary: the carpet
sweeper and the machine gun, the sleeping car and the harvester-thresher, the electric iron and
the incandescent light, the phonograph and the safety razor, linotype and vulcanized rubber, to
name just a few. For another thing, the United States, just twenty-four years old at the century's
start, was busy inventing itself, and photography — discovered in France by Nicephore Niepce
and developed there by Louis Daguerre and independently in England by William Henry Fox
Talbot — would prove to be an essential tool in that process of self-creation. But just as the
national identity could compose itself from the synthesis of many nationalities, and just as
the American language — based on English, itself a welding together of Latin and Germanic
strains — would become an omnivorous and ever-expanding construct that could take in bor
rowings from virtually every language, so the art and science of photography were effortlessly
adopted by the fledgling nation, which could almost persuade itself of its ownership.
For much of the nineteenth century the arts in America were an item of contention
between, on the one hand, those self-consciously shadowed by European tradition and, on the
other hand, those who set out to create a new agenda specific to their own surroundings and
history. The former were long the more powerful and prestigious, at least in literature and
music. In literature in particular the neglect of the genuinely new by contemporary American
critics is well known. Edgar Allan Poe was for a long time more famous in France than at home;
Herman Melville died in poverty and obscurity, and his works were not accorded much real
attention or respect until the 1920s; the greater part of Emily Dickinson's corpus was not even
published until midway through the twentieth century. (In music the battle is far from over
even now, as the work of such major American composers of this century as Duke Ellington and
Thelonious Monk continues to be relegated to the status of popular entertainment.) The visual
arts enjoyed a somewhat different fate, for reasons that had a great deal to do with the relation
of Americans to their own landscape. The scale of the American vista demanded representation
in ways that had few antecedents in European painting, and those painters who could deliver
the goods became popular in a fashion that cut across class lines, whether their subjects were
the familiar valleys of the East Coast or the titanic panoramas of the far West. Frederic Edwin
Church's massive canvas Niagara (1857; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) is a
famous but hardly unique example of a painting that could draw large crowds without sacrific
ing anything in the way of artistic integrity.
By the time photography was technically capable of taking in the grandeur of western
landscapes its audience was already well prepared; but before this came an event that did much
to establish the importance of photography in America: the Civil War. This astonishingly
bloody struggle (nearly half a million dead on both sides between 1861 and 1865), which not
only divided the nation but divided states and counties and even families, was without question
the defining experience of the century. It was also, as no war had been up to that time (with only
the partial exception of the Crimean War), extensively documented by photographers, in par
ticular by Mathew Brady and his associates, including Alexander Gardner and Timothy
O'Sullivan. Their work altered forever the representation of war, virtually killing off the heroic
ideal of military painting, and it brought the sickening news home to remote northern villages
and isolated farmsteads, where it could not be denied in the name of patriotism or wishful
thinking. Albums of war scenes were sold by subscription, establishing a market that would later
be adapted to the sale of collections of photographs in the wake of major disasters, from the
Johnstown (Pennsylvania) flood of 1889 to the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906.
After the war, western expansion resumed in earnest, and the United States government
began its ambitious surveying expeditions of the uncharted territories between the Great Plains
and the Pacific Coast, such as Clarence King's "Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel"
and Lieutenant George Wheeler's "Survey West of the One Hundredth Meridian," both of
which employed O'Sullivan as official photographer, and Dr. Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden's
"Survey of the Territories," which hired photographer William Henry Jackson. Their pho
tographs, as well as those of independent commercial operators such as Carleton Watkins, had
a galvanizing effect on the American public, which had perhaps taken in such sights in the
paintings of Albert Bierstadt but not quite believed they were real. It was a direct result of these
pictures that a movement to preserve natural splendors detached itself from the general enter
prise of exploitation; Jackson's photographs, for example, persuaded the government to declare
the astonishing collection of topographical phenomena known as Yellowstone as the first
national park, in 1872.
Another major development in the use of photography in the late nineteenth century
took much longer to achieve fruition. On March 4, 1880, the New YorkDaily Graphic became
the first newspaper to print a photograph in halftone. This picture, a view of a New York
shantytown by Henry J. Newton, was perhaps crude by later standards in its reproduction,
but nevertheless perfectly intelligible, although the time and expense then required by the
process meant that twenty years would pass before newspaper use of photographs would
become routine, during which time newspapers continued to rely upon wood engravings for
illustration purposes. The work of the photographer Jacob Riis is the most striking example of
the effects of this technological lapse. Beginning sometime in 1887, Riis, accompanied by
the amateur photographers Richard Hoe Lawrence and Henry G. Piffard, started photograph
ing the denatured-alcohol saloons and the verminous lodgings of the most desperate of the
poor in New York City, mostly working in the middle of the night, employing a novelty: the
magnesium-powder flash. Riis also wrote about what he saw, and his work was published first in
the New YorkSun and then in a series of books beginning with How the Other Half Lives (1890).
He concurrently lectured on the subject of poverty and the slums, and his work had real, mea
surable effects, leading to the destruction of the worst rookeries and their replacement by
settlement houses, schools, and parks. His photographs, however, were first seen by the public
as bare approximations in the form of outline sketches, which gave nothing of the detail he was
so brilliant at capturing: the material detail of dirt, crumbling masonry, and decaying mat
tresses, and the human detail of proud, beaten, innocent, or hardened faces belonging to the
victims of social conditions. These crucial elements could be appreciated only by those who
cared enough to buy his books or attend his lantern-slide lectures. Even after he had achieved
prominence, the importance of his work as photography continued to be neglected. It was not
set right until the photographer Alexander Alland tracked down those of his plates that had
survived, made new prints, and exhibited them in 1947 (see page 73).
Another radical turn in the history of photography occurred in 1888, with George
Eastman's development of the box camera and the establishment of his Eastman Kodak
Company. Suddenly photographs could be made by all. The apparatus was lightweight (twenty-
two ounces), small, easy to use, and the problems of developing and printing were circumvented
by the simple expedient of sending the entire machine to Eastman Kodak — as the advertise
ment went: "You press the button; We do the rest.'" The camera went on the market early in
the year, and by September 13,000 had been sold. Family photograph albums, formerly com
prised of pages with die-cut windows for the insertion of cartes de visite or cabinet cards, now
had pages of black uncoated stock with slits at angles to fit the corners of the cards that bore the
distinctive round pictures of the early Kodaks.
Around the same time another development with far-reaching consequences was invisibly
taking place. Thomas Alva Edison, not taking the matter too seriously, was working on the
Kinetoscope, which he patented in 1891, a peep-show cabinet for the viewing of motion pic
tures. On a revolving convertible stage on the grounds of his West Orange, New Jersey, labo
ratories, he shot film of diverse subjects — clowns and lovers and Buffalo Bill— and in April
1894, the first parlor for the exhibition of these films opened on Broadway in New York City.
The first screen show occurred two years later in a cabaret on Twenty-third Street and featured,
among other things, film of crashing waves (which apparently caused a small panic among the
innocent spectators, who could not quite convince themselves that the water was confined to
the picture), of Kaiser Wilhelm reviewing his troops, of a dancer whose butterfly wings were
hand-tinted on the film. Edison so scorned his invention that he did not bother to patent it in
Europe, with the result that it was refined and developed by French and English experimenters.
By the mid- 1890s, the westward propulsion that had driven the country for more than a
century had all but ended. There was no longer any frontier to push toward. Oklahoma
Territory, to which the Cherokees and many other Native American tribes from different parts
of the country had been forcibly relocated, was opened to settlers of European stock in 1889, in
disregard of treaties between the United States government and the Native American tribes. At
noon on April 22, revolvers were fired, and some fifty thousand people raced to stake their
claims; within twenty- four hours two million acres had been taken. The last major battle of the
Indian Wars occurred the following year, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, an uneven struggle
that resulted in the deaths of about two hundred Native American men, women, and children.
By the time Edward S. Curtis first undertook his massive twenty- volume documentary project
The North American Indian in 1896 (not to be finished until 1930), the indigenous culture of his
subjects was becoming a memory (page 60), and Curtis is known to have persuaded fully west
ernized Comanches and Sioux to don garments and headdresses they had not worn in many
years for the benefit of his camera, and to have retouched his prints to excise such objects as
clocks and lamps. Matters were slightly different in the Southwest, where peace-loving tribes
such as the Hopi and Zuni lived relatively unmolested on desert tracts that white settlers did
not much want anyway. The photographs of Adam Clark Vroman, for one, had an effect both
as anthropological records and as documents of the Pueblo aesthetic (page 62), which was to
have considerable impact on American modernism.
The 1890s were still a time of innocent fascination, when unfreighted beauty could be a
subject for straight photography, as in Henry Hamilton Bennett's nearly lifelong study of the
idyllic Wisconsin Dells (pages 58-59), and when ethnological description could be imbued
with both humanist concern and painterly delicacy, as in Arnold Genthe's photographs of
Asians in Japan and in San Francisco's Chinatown (page 72). The relative naivete of such
approaches was not to remain viable much longer, however. Bennett's view of pristine nature
was even then finding an answering descant in the work of Darius Kinsey, who was in the busi
ness of documenting the logging trade, not commenting on the defoliation of the American
wilderness; nevertheless his pictures are the first systematic record of the exploitation of nature
in the West (page 75). Likewise, Genthe's straightforward and respectful interest in types
would soon be overtaken by changing attitudes. His contemporary Frances Benjamin Johnston,
a feminist and a niece of President Grover Cleveland, produced in The Hampton Album a pio
neering photographic plea for racial equality (page 67). Her serene, poised pictures of African-
American students at Hampton Institute in Virginia, studying such subjects as the architecture
of the English cathedral towns, formed a particularly understated document of social protest in
a culture where lynchings continued for another half century and more.
The turn of the century, however imprecise a date, nevertheless stands as a sort of
alchemical gateway past which life was transformed. On its far side stood the nascent modern
world. The United States, having expelled Spain from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines,
was now a world power as well as a colonial power. In 1903 the treaty with Panama was signed
that would allow the United States to build and own a canal through the isthmus, and that same
year Orville and Wilbur Wright made their first successful flight in an airplane, at Kitty Hawk,
North Carolina. One year earlier, in 1902, the Flatiron Building was completed in New York
City, not the first edifice to be called a skyscraper but, with its exaggerated wedge shape, cer
tainly the most striking. It quickly became a point of photographic reference, as it was shot in
turn by Alfred Stieglitz (page 83), Edward Steichen, Alvin Langdon Coburn, much later by
Berenice Abbott, and in between by hundreds of postcard and stereograph photographers and
thousands of amateurs, all from virtually the same angle. The pictorialists were thus linked with
the most rough-hewn of vernacular photographers in their mutual contemplation of a single
icon. Even as the Photo-Secessionists entered a plea for photography to be considered an equal
to painting in the oligarchy of the arts, and not a mere mechanic's profession, they stood to pay
homage to that building, at once a work of art and of engineering. This could be said to be one
of the formative episodes of modernism.
This does not, of course, diminish the great confections of Stieglitz, Steichen, Coburn,
Gertrude Kasebier, Clarence H. White, and John G. Bullock, among others. Their work is not
only beautiful in itself but represents one of the classic American course corrections. The
American temperament, headstrong and hell-bent, has always tacked toward one bank and been
forcibly redirected toward the other, veering at intervals between the raw and the cooked, the
sacred and the profane, the high and the low. The Photo-Secessionist search for the sublime
through the compromised means of a mechanical process parallels the dialectic between the
Virgin and the Dynamo that the historian and critic Henry Adams found in the Gothic cathe
drals and described in his Mont Saint Michel and, Chaitres (1904). Early modernism could be said
to concern the search for the soul in the midst of the wind tunnel of progress; in any event it
certainly did involve the enjambment of contradictions, which were beginning to multiply fero
ciously. Stieglitz in particular was a lightning rod of contradictions, both as photographer and
as impresario; he could in his enthusiasms encompass both the ethereal loveliness of White's
abstracted Ophelias and the upended urinal of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain , which he in fact
photographed for the Dada journal The Blind Man in 1917.
Perhaps even more radical in his leaps was Edward Steichen, who might seem to have 45
reinvented himself in every decade, from Post-Impressionist, making landscapes that seem
barely possible as products of a camera, to portraitist of glamour for fashionable magazines, to
document maker for the United States Navy by the time of World War II. Paul Strand, in a dif
ferent way, was able to embody the highest ideals of the pictorialists and to join them with a
photographic tendency that Stieglitz otherwise seems to have scorned: social documentation.
But Strand's depiction of the poor on the city streets is formal, disengaged, a bit chilly. These
qualities are especially striking when his work is compared to that of Lewis W. Hine, a photog
rapher with whom Strand studied but whose contemporary existence the other Photo-
Secessionists do not appear to have registered. Hine's subjects are always returning the
photographer's stare. Hine had taken up the mantle of Jacob Riis as the recording eye of the
reform movement that was labeled, at first disparagingly, "muckraking." His photographs
of young children working in mines and factories provided evidence of the widespread abuse of
child labor laws, and generated an outrage that led to a protracted struggle for the passage of an
enforceable national law, something that did not, however, occur until 1938.
Strand's photographs did not share this crusading mission, but they were frank about the
actual look of the streets and the people who inhabited them, in this way perhaps demonstrat
ing a common purpose with the painters of the so-called Ashcan school, otherwise known as
The Eight. These painters, who included Robert Henri, George Luks, William Glackens, and
John Sloan, were anti-academics who, while not terribly modernist in technique, sought their
subjects in the alleys and saloons, among the lowlife and crowds of New York City. They were
in their own way reaffirming the importance of depicting unmistakably American scenes, the
old struggle revived once again, and they did not shy away from showing billboards, rubbish,
newsstands, elevated trains, boxing matches, and other determinedly nonpicturesque matters.
This Americanism did not, however, prevent them from participating in the Armory Show in
1913, the watershed of modernism in America, which brought to a large stateside audience for
the first time the work of Picasso and Braque, and most provocatively, Duchamp's Nude
Descending a Staircase (19 12; Philadelphia Museum of Art). On the field of American taste, the
battle of modernism was joined.
And yet a native antecedent was lying close at hand. In 1910 the young painters Charles
Sheeler and Morton Schamberg began renting a stone farmhouse, built in 1768, in Doylestown,
Pennsylvania. The house was plain and rectilinear in the most traditional American style, a style
that achieved its look through the combination of practical necessity and Puritan self-denial.
Not a trace of ornament found its way into or onto the house, nor on any of its furniture. Its
stonework marked it as an example of the particular style that had grown up among the Quaker
settlements along the lower Delaware River, but it shared many other traits with regional
modes of construction of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries through
out the northeastern United States. Within a few years of moving in Sheeler began to photo
graph the house's details (page 102), recognizing a strength of line shared with such modernist
inspirations as machinery and African sculpture. Eventually he was to find the purest expression
in the history of American design in the work of the Shakers, a millenarian sect that split off
from the Quakers in England in the mid-eighteenth century but was fully realized in upstate
New York under the direction of Mother Ann Lee beginning in 1774. The Shakers, who were
celibate and communitarian, believed in achieving grace through simplicity and harmony of
line; their buildings and furnishings look absolutely timeless. Sheeler's interest in this neglected
American style coincided with the work of the Arts and Crafts movement, actually a complex of
separate tendencies that arose simultaneously around the turn of the century in different parts
of the United States. These tendencies shared the influence of the English poet, designer, and
theorist William Morris, who espoused a return to medieval craftsmanship as a reaction against
industrialism. In America the movement's chief products included the clean, spare furniture of
Gustav Stickley and the exquisitely printed if vacuous books of Elbert Hubbard. Today their
ideology is virtually forgotten, but their strong designs remain influential. The sense of line and
the search for an American form they shared with Sheeler exemplify the paradoxical link
between modernism and antimodernism during the fertile period before World War I.
Sheeler's interests also seem to have been anticipated by the photographer and illustrator
Clifton Johnson, about whom little is known (page 63). But then, many isolated artists and
visionary eccentrics flourished at this time, inspired to action by the ease and availability of
equipment and perhaps by stray bits of information about current tendencies blown by news
paper accounts across the countryside. The first two decades of the century saw an unprece
dented mushrooming of amateur photographic activity in every corner of the country. While
every town of any size had its camera club, whose members dutifully read Wilson's Photographic
Magazine , and perhaps Camera Work, and produced exquisite and boring pictorial compositions
based on the latest strictures emanating from New York, there were also numerous practition
ers whose ambitions were plainer and more naive, and whose work in many cases appears the
stronger today. A change in postal regulations in 1905 led to a boom in the production of pho
tographic postcards that lasted until about 1918. Amateurs and professionals alike turned these
out, the latter in part benefiting from the yet undeveloped state of halftone reproduction in
newspapers, and thus documenting fires, floods, tornadoes, barn raisings, train wrecks, store
openings, county fairs, hail storms, parades, and the incursion by the United States Army into
Mexico between 1912 and 1916, in editions that ranged from several dozen to several thousand.
(One of these professionals was the young Edward Weston, who began his career in 1906-07 as
a door-to-door postcard photographer in Tropico, California.) Amateurs, too, made pictures of
friends, family, landscapes, and houses with a straightforwardness that did not look like a style
then but often does to latter-day eyes. The extraordinary embellishments of Charles Norman
Sladen in his album of holiday photographs (page 77) represent one particular extreme of this
amateur aesthetic, although a surprising number of Americans possess albums taken by their
fathers or grandfathers circa 1912 that seem not much less self-conscious in their formalism. It
was a time when the medium not only appeared available to all, but when the rules of snapshot-
making remained unwritten, encouraging experimentation.
Another singular artist of the period was Ernest J. Bellocq, whose work was generally
unknown until its discovery by Lee Friedlander in the 1960s. Bellocq was sort of a Toulouse-
Lautrec of the New Orleans red-light district known as Storyville, the largest such in the coun
try until its suppression in 1917, following an order by the United States secretary of war
prohibiting open prostitution within five miles of an army camp and a similar ruling by the sec
retary of the navy. Bellocq 's portraits of whores are eloquent and grave (page 71), and if any
thing show the sadness of the women, quite distinct from what is often written about the
neighborhood, which was also, beginning in the mid- 1890s, the birthplace of modern jazz, the
place where Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, and their older mentors,
including Buddy Bolden and Freddy Keppard, first played in cabarets and whorehouse parlors.
Storyville was also racially integrated, as during the period was much of New Orleans, an exhil
arating setting no doubt, for all but the inmates of the soi-disant houses of joy. These latter were
released into scullery work as a consequence of World War I, which also had such effects upon
the American public, directly or not, as the prohibition of alcoholic beverages, the crackdown
 upon and deportation of subversive elements, and the ending of the carefree, venturesome
period that had preceded it. A new spirit of conformity was in the air, an apt illustration of
which is Arthur S. Mole and John D. Thomas's The Human U.S. Shield (page 79), one of many
such photographic demonstrations of esprit de corps during that time.
2 In 1925 President Calvin Coolidge announced: "The business of America is business,"
and so it was, although it could take such diverse forms as bootlegging, public relations, mail
order chicanery, moviemaking, tent-show revival preaching, and grinding factory labor. The
photographs of the 1920s, for all their dissimilarity in other respects, share an iconic quality,
perhaps in part because everyone was searching for some kind of consolidation and in part
because everyone had been affected by the rise of the print media, in the form of magazines and
illustrated newspapers, to the extent of searching for a clear, swift, visual shorthand. The New
York Daily News was launched in 1919, the first of the tabloids, small-format populist news
papers that emphasized visual punch over textual content and even coherence; this was labeled
"jazz journalism." A year later Conde Nast inaugurated Vanity Fair , a magazine that could retail
Hollywood, high fashion, and James Joyce all in the same breath. Steichen's portrait of Gloria
Swanson (page 125) ran in its pages, as well as his indelible images of Greta Garbo, and
Nickolas Muray's image of possibly the most famous baseball player of all time, Babe Ruth
(page 124). In retrospect, Lewis Hine's Stea?nfitter would not have seemed out of place there
either (page 129). Unlike his earlier pictures of child laborers and immigrants at Ellis Island,
this is not an angry or anguished image but one almost imbued with glamour, as were, in the
following decade, his shots of workers constructing the upper stories of the Empire State
Building, which can look like an aerial ballet. His view that labor is not merely dignified but
heroic and beautiful anticipates themes that occupied Soviet photographers a bit later in the
decade. In the same way, Paul Outerbridge's Ide Collar of 1922 (page 122), made for an adver
tisement, could slide effortlessly into any line-up of images produced by the Bauhaus-
influenced German photographers a few years later. The excitement of dynamism, force, and
speed now can clearly be seen as having spanned the ideological spectrum, uniting the tools of
capitalism and their opponents in a delirium of modernity for a brief while before the world
wide economic collapse of 1929.
These disparate manifestations also, of course, reflected the lessons of Cubism, absorbed
by many, if unconsciously, by 192 1. Cubism, ridiculed by critics for a few years following the
Armory Show of 1913, had found its American voice, not only in the paintings of Joseph Stella
and Marsden Hartley but in a wide range of less obvious places, from George Herriman's
comic strip Krazy Kat and its slapstick mysticism set in the Arizona desert to the frantic
polyphony of New Orleans jazz to the stop-and-go rhythms of Charlie Chaplin's silent come
dies. Gilbert Seldes's influential polemic The Seven Lively Arts (1924) swept all these things,
along with vaudeville and burlesque, into a single breathless phenomenon, and closed by link
ing it all to the work of Picasso. The book has not aged well, but its insights were prescient.
Numerous American artists came to a similar conclusion: that the slashing geometry and simul
taneity and jarring juxtaposition European artists had to work for were already effortlessly
present in the lights of Broadway and the steel mills of Pennsylvania and even in the small
town Main Street, which seemed to exist in several eras at once.
Many Americans had to go abroad to be able to see their country in its freshest light, free
from the distraction of its poltroons and reactionaries, its Ku Klux Klan, Elks Club, and
American Legion, its Bible-thumpers who in 1923 put a man on trial in Tennessee for the crime
of having taught the theory of evolution to a high-school class. The photographers Edward
Weston and Tina Modotti went to Mexico in 192 1 perhaps in search of adventure and romance
but also to learn how to look at things (pages 107-109), the way Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein went to France, T. S. Eliot to England, and Ezra Pound to Italy.
Weston came back to California before the end of the decade with a new ambition to record the
objects and landscapes around him with a clear eye. Similarly, the first fruit of Hemingway's life
in France was the purified vision of American life he expressed in In Our Time (1925). The year
1925, in fact, saw a great outpouring of literary works that went to the heart of the American
experience: John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer made a huge cubist canvas of newspaper
headlines, radio voices, and small dramas on the street; Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby eulogized
the myth of success; William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain reimagined American his
tory as a vast collage; Gertrude Stein's The Making ofAmericans broke a family history up into a
million tiny pieces. This new vision was enthusiastic but also dry and undeceived. Thus it was
that when Stieglitz called his last gallery An American Place in 1930, the name could be free of
any hint of jingoism but full of the critical spirit that reclaimed the nation from its Babbitts.
By that time, American photographers had begun to look at their surroundings in a larger
way that served popular culture up in its entirety, not just as fragments. If Weston's Torsoof Neil
and Strand's Akeley Motion Picture Camera (pages 106 and 112) could in their purity have been
taken, at least in theory, in Iceland or Australia, the same could not be said for the work of
Ralph Steiner, or of Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott, fresh from Paris and the lessons of
Eugene Atget. Even Sheeler in his love of native American construction and strength of line
would have stopped short of depicting the chewing-tobacco advertisement on the side of the
barn. Paul Strand might have done so; he showed billboards in his Truckman's House series of
1920, but as formal details, not as the main subject. Steiner, on the other hand, made an enor
mous Camel cigarettes advertisement the center of a picture as early as 1923. What was hap
pening, in part, was the phenomenon described and for that matter advocated by Gilbert
Seldes: the blurring of the line of demarcation between high and low culture. It could, of
course, be said that this process has long been underway in America, that it was simply a
matter of people being slow to recognize it. Could Herriman's Krazy Kat even be considered
popular culture? It was a comic strip, it ran in a daily newspaper, and its characters were anthro
pomorphized cats and mice and dogs and geese; but, on the other hand, it was anything but
obvious in its meaning, more of a continuing Zen parable, and its mass popularity was so want
ing that it remained in the pages of newspapers for decades only because William Randolph
Hearst himself was a fan.
The movies were what raised the stakes. Almost immediately upon their introduction in
the 1890s the movies were considered not merely silly but actively disreputable. For years
theaters were concentrated in poor neighborhoods, and, even if producers tried to raise their
tone by featuring inert tableaux starring the likes of Sarah Bernhardt, the public vastly preferred
simple telegraphic slapstick. D. W. Griffith, after making hundreds of two-reelers in every
genre, managed to achieve respectability with his epics The Birth of a Nation (19 15) and
Intolerance (1916), even if the former now looks racist and the latter terribly windy. Griffith's
struggle, for all the virtues of his films, was at least in his mind being enacted on the field of
theater, literature, and painting. Meanwhile Charles Chaplin was starting to make real art in his
deceptively simple comedies, which assumed no formal antecedents but took the moviemaking
process as a given. The mass audience understood him perfectly, having been faster than the
critics at absorbing the cinematic vocabulary of cuts and pans and wipes and zooms, the innately
modern aesthetic of fragmentation and collage. The 1920s saw an efflorescence of brilliance in
the movies, made and appreciated by people who had grown up with the medium and did not
need to make excuses for it. By the second half of the 1920s there were few people left who
could dismiss the movies as brainless trash. Indeed, the movies of the period include some of
the most sublime ever made: Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1924), Chaplin's The Gold Rush
(1925), Buster Keaton's The General (1927), King Vidor's The Crowd (1928), and F. W. Murnau's
Sunrise (1927). The movies were becoming almost too artistic for their own good; the critic
John Grierson remarked, after seeing an early film by Josef von Sternberg: "When a director
dies, he becomes a photographer.'" Just in time, though, the movies were restored to vulgarity
by the introduction of sound, as of 1928.
A year later, the stock market crashed, with worldwide repercussions. Suddenly people
who had been attending the opera and decorating their homes with Viennese bibelots were
reduced to reading Spicy Stories and visiting burlesque houses when they could scrape together
twenty-five cents. The pretensions of a good part of the nation were leveled by circumstances.
It now became not only possible but necessary for modernists to look down from the wonder
fully detailed setbacks of skyscrapers and see the quick-lunch stands that tenanted the ground
floors. The demotic was now not just haphazardly beautiful in bits and pieces but exhilarating
in its total effect. Other forces were at work as well. Around 1927 and 1928 recording compa
nies started taking an interest in the native music of the American people, finally making com
mercially available the blues and hillbilly songs that had been around for decades, or even
centuries, for the first time in the thirty-year history of recorded sound. It also became appar
ent in the midst of sweeping change that progress was a two-way street, that as dynamic new
things were being made and built, not just outmoded junk but eloquent expressions of pre-
modern sensibility were being ruthlessly swept away.
Abbott had carried this latter point back to New York from her exposure to Atget's great
photographic project describing France in the early twentieth century, and she set about docu
menting the city in transition with a zeal that encompassed construction and demolition, sky
scrapers and slums, window displays and boarded-up storefronts (page 143). Evans had learned
how to see not only from the Cubists but from the vernacular photography that was being made
in his youth. The two influences gave him an outlook that could take in the most heterogeneous
subjects, and the confidence — with possibly also an inherited Yankee plainness — to register
them in head-on, unmitigated fashion. His first published work was apparently Brooklyn Bridge
(page 135), which appeared as the frontispiece to the first edition of Hart Crane's great poem
"The Bridge" (1930). He made his most famous work, however, between 1935 and 1938 as an
employee of the Farm Security Administration.
Upon being elected president in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt was faced with the worst of
the delayed effects of the Great Depression. The morning of his inauguration, March 4, 1933,
was coincidentally an enforced national bank holiday; the system was close to breaking down
altogether. Roosevelt took control of Congress and within three months had forced the passage
of fifteen new laws, which established an unprecedented network of government agencies, often
referred to as "alphabet soup." Among these were the Federal Insurance Deposit Administration
(FIDA), which insured bank deposits; the Federal Housing Authority (FHA), which stopped
foreclosures on homes; the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which built dams and generated
hydroelectric power in the neglected Tennessee valley; the National Recovery Act (NRA),
which regulated prices and wages; the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which put two and
a half million unemployed men to work at conservation and reforestation; the Public Works
Administration (PWA), which built government structures from dams and ports to zoos and
swimming pools; the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which employed artists, writers,
theater people, and composers; and the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which supported
crop prices, assisted farmers with equipment, feed, and seed, and, if all else was unavailing,
helped resettle farm families. Secretary of Agriculture Rexford Tugwell, who oversaw the FSA,
instituted an historical unit to provide documentation of conditions in the rural United States.
Under the supervision of Roy Stryker, photographers such as Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben
Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans, and Marion Post Wolcott, among others,
were given lists of suggested topics (which many of them ignored). Their total output, at least as
it currently stands in the FSA archive in the Library of Congress, comes to some 75,000 prints.
The program seems to have been constantly subject to the volatile mix of temperaments
of those involved. Evans was finally fired, and Lange was fired and reinstated several times. All
of them traveled a great deal: Lange mostly concentrated on California and Arizona, but she
also worked in Georgia, the Carolinas, and Mississippi, while Evans covered most of the South,
with particular emphasis on Alabama. While Lange purposely pointed her pictures toward a
moral conclusion, Evans was deliberately nonjudgmental and avoided anything that smacked of
didacticism. Some of Evans's Alabama pictures from the summer of 1936 had an additional pur
pose. He and the writer James Agee had been commissioned by Fortune magazine to do a series
of articles on the daily lives of tenant farmers in the South. Lor about six weeks they lived with
the families of Lloyd Burroughs, Lrank Tengle, and Bud Lields. Their work was rejected by
Fortune , a lavishly produced periodical devoted to financial matters that was later to hire Evans
as an associate editor, but an expanded version was published, in 1941, as the book Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men. The volume began with sixty-one uncaptioned pages of Evans's pho
tographs, followed by some four hundred pages of Agee's prose, somber, exhaustive, impas
sioned, and Biblical in its rhythms. It sold only about six hundred copies in its first year of
publication, but a decade later was considered a classic work of American literature.
Fortune was published by Henry R. Luce, the publisher of Time magazine, who in 1936
launched Life, a picture magazine that may have owed something to such foreign predecessors
as the Miinchner Illustrierte Presse and The Illustrated London News, but in its large budget,
relentless optimism, and corporate identity represented something very new and very
American. Its tone is fairly well caught by a superior example of the photographic work it pub
lished, Margaret Bourke-White's At the Time of the Louisville Flood (page 149), a picture whose
aphoristic terseness, hortatory power, and easy irony are utterly indivisible from one another.
Life specialized in the kind of pictures that are used to sum up entire eras and mores in potted
histories, such as the numerous summary picture books published by Time, Inc. After the war,
it was fortunate enough to enlist the services of W. Eugene Smith, a passionate moralist whose
photojournalistic method required absolute commitment to his subjects (pages 196 and 200). A
very different form of photojournalism was practiced by Weegee (Arthur Lellig), which might
be considered the highest example of the tabloid style. In Weegee's hands this cynicism is so
extreme it almost becomes a kind of innocence, the visual equivalent of the verbal styles of the
New York tough guys played by James Cagney and sentimentalized in the stories of Damon
Runyon (pages 166 and 167).
With the rise of fascism in Europe a new wave of immigration occurred, consisting pri
marily of Jewish, leftist, and free-thinking artists and intellectuals. Among the photographers
who were part of this influx were the Austrian-born Lisette Model (page 161) and the German-
born John Gutmann, whose photographic vocation was actually a consequence of his decision
to leave Europe — it was a means for him to earn a living abroad (page 160). These emigres
inevitably brought with them a sensibility honed by the prevailing winds of the Weimar era, as
well as the surprise of encountering the oversized popular culture and landscape of the United
States. Emigres in general promptly got busy in America, founding The New School for Social
Research in New York and the Chicago Institute of Design (originally the New Bauhaus); revi
talizing the faculties of such institutions as the University of Chicago and the physics depart
ment at Princeton University; and making earnest if often stymied attempts to broaden the
output of the Hollywood movie studios (if the movies defeated Bertolt Brecht and Arnold
Schonberg, they were mastered by more flexible temperaments, such as those of Fritz Lang and
Billy Wilder). Another major export, as of the early 1940s, was Surrealism. Andre Breton set
tled in New York, and Marcel Duchamp returned there; Max Ernst found his way to New
Mexico and Yves Tanguy to Connecticut. Among their more visible manifestations were the
shows at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York and the magazines View and VVV, which began
a sort of dialogue between the French luminaries and their American counterparts, whose best
work was, as in the boxes of Joseph Cornell and the photographs of Clarence John Laughlin,
an indigenous American parallel rather than a mere following of orders (pages 175 and 179).
The work of George Piatt Lynes, too, has its Surrealist aspect, although issuing from the con
text of New York's dance and theater world (pages 164 and 174) and therefore reflecting the
influence of the critical impresario Lincoln Kirstein, who had earlier and in a different way
guided the young Walker Evans. The Italian-born Frederick Sommer, meanwhile, met Ernst in
the Southwest and found his own version of Surrealism in the bleached detritus of the desert
(pages 176 and 177).
Phis was a long way from the vision of the West nurtured and propounded by Ansel
Adams over the course of his nearly sixty-year career (pages 117, 120, 121, and 186). Adams's
name is probably known to more Americans than that of any other photographer, and he
achieved genuine widespread affection, the populist equivalent of national-treasure status, of a
sort that Americans rarely accord to fine artists. Adams's epic photographs of the West evoke
the virgin continent in a credible way and inspire awe while avoiding sentimentality. They pre
sent landscapes as unaltered as those in the pictures of O'Sullivan and Jackson, although even as
they were being taken these landscapes were being hemmed in, domesticated, invaded by
tourists, loggers, and mining concerns. Adams, born in San Francisco in 1902, had begun pho
tographing in Yosemite at the age of fourteen, so he came about his vision honestly. After him
landscape photographers would either have to work in smaller scales, as is true of Paul
Caponigro and to a certain extent Minor White, for example, or, as in the current school pio
neered by Robert Adams, would perforce have to present a vitiated terrain, strip-mined and
dotted with tract houses.
The new prosperity of the country after the war also broadened the readership of the
fashion magazines. Harper's Bazaar and the American edition of Vogue, formerly in thrall to
Paris and read generally only by the rich and by people in the trades, began striking off in new
directions under the guidance of such adventurous editors as Diana Vreeland and Carmel Snow,
as well as Conde Nast's art director of many years, Alexander Liberman, himself a modernist
sculptor born in Russia and trained in Paris. Among their decisive hirings were Irving Penn and
Richard Avedon, both of whom studied design under the vastly influential photographer Alexey
Brodovitch (later art director for Harper's Bazaar). The coincidence of Penn's and Avedon's par
allel careers has led to their frequently being lumped together, an unfortunate tendency which
masks their very individual approaches. It might be said in the roughest way, for example, that
where Avedon in his fashion work was sunlit and expansive, Penn was concentrated and smokey.
 In any event, they established themselves in polar positions, which determined the field within
which fashion photography would develop through the 1950s and 1960s.
The popular impression of the 1950s, based on the imagery of the period, as retailed by
such pictorial magazines of the era as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post as well as by televi
sion, is of a safe, dull period, kept quiet by either repression or contentment. The photography
of the postwar era, however, acts as a corrective to this cliche, beginning with Ted Croner's
speeding car, taken at the tail end of the 1940s, an appropriately ambiguous icon (page 218).
The large American automobile, the country's preeminent synecdoche of ease and success, is
here transformed into a spectral blur that calls up death's skeletal horse. Similarly at odds with
received ideas of how life was lived are, for example, Dan Weiner's frantic suburbanites and
Bruce Davidson's ghostly teenagers, as are, in a different way, Leon Levinstein's African-
American family and Roy DeCarava's children, taken at a time when American blacks were rep
resented even in the liberal press mostly as symbols or as the focus of controversies. Where we
can see the mythic 1950s is in O. Winston Link's Hot Shot East Bound at lager, West Virginia , a
photograph which — in its deliberately theatrical lighting and its stripped-in movie-screen
image — is a thoroughgoing confection (page 232). Its aura of simultaneous expectation and
nostalgia marks it as a kind of apotheosis of the decade's wish imagery.
All of which partly accounts for the reception accorded Robert Frank's The Americans —
the seminal photography book of the decade — upon its publication in the United States in
1959. Frank, who came to the United States from Switzerland in 1947, traveled through the
country in 1955 and 1956, his odyssey funded by a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
(These grants had been a major source of financial support for photographers since Weston
became the first practitioner to receive one in 1937, and so they continue to be today.) He took
pictures in all parts of the nation, of diverse subjects, including citizens from all walks of life.
There was poverty in his pictures but also wealth, degradation and dignity, loneliness and con
viviality, youth and age, black and white, respectability and its opposite. When it came out
it was pilloried. Photography magazines, among others, published reviews that spoke of
"a warped objectivity," claimed that it was "marred by spite, bitterness, and narrow prejudice,"
4 called it "a sad poem for sick people." There were formal reasons for this vitriol: no image was
sharp and rounded, nothing about them was fixed or definite, and everything was provisional,
indeterminate. There was no question of a decisive moment; these were the moments in
between. But surely the reaction owed part of its particular force to the fact that the images
were nearly all of that nameless thing in the weeds behind the billboard of American life. Even
the images that spoke of prosperity, ceremony, and families caught those qualities at uncom-
posed instants. The book was not an attack, but it refused to be comforting. Somehow, in the
hour of its greatest strength, the American nation badly needed reassurance.
The book, of course, became not only a classic but a touchstone. The introduction of the
American edition was written by Jack Kerouac (it was first published in France, with a lengthy
introductory text assembled by the poet Alain Bosquet). It was not Kerouac's finest piece of
writing, maybe, but it agreed with the reviewer at least in calling the book a poem, and as such
allied with the pursuit of real freedom, truth, and spirituality that engaged the Beats. Frank's
later collaboration with the Beats included the antic i960 film Pull My Daisy, which feels, at
least, like one of the most spontaneous movies ever made. In spite of the fact that the 1950s saw
a flowering of independent and avant-garde film in America, few photographers, perhaps sur
prisingly, were involved. The slim tradition of movies by photographers in the United States
begins with Sheeler and Strand's extraordinary but little-shown Manhatta (192 1), a panoramic
 documentary of New York City with text from Walt Whitman's poems. Ralph Steiner shot Pare
20 Lorentz's FSA documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) with Strand and made H
(1929) and Pie in the Sky (1934), the latter in collaboration with the young Elia Kazan. Helen
Levitt, with Janice Loeb and James Agee, made In the Street (1952), which successfully extends
the premises of her still photographs into motion-picture form, and Rudy Burckhardt's various
documentary shorts, beginning in the late 1940s, likewise are of a piece with his photographs
(pages 154 and 155). In 1948 Weegee produced Weegee'sNew York, an odd movie of two
unequal halves, the first an entertainingly goofy voyeuristic look at Coney Island and the second
a profoundly boring patchwork of nighttime shots of the city through assorted filters and dis
torting lenses. The sole photographer of note to have made the transition to commercial cin
ema is Gordon Parks. After more than two decades on the staff of Life magazine, Parks directed
the film version of his children's book The Learning Tree (1968), and then went on to write and
direct Shaft and Shaft's Big Score (1971 and 1972).
A new skepticism crept into the American picture between the late 1950s and the early
1960s. A generational change was taking place, and among other things young people had been
saturated with photographic images. Television was by then universal in the United States, and
the first generation to have grown up with it was also the first to reject its dubious authority.
The period also brought with it too much information and a surfeit of events. It might seem in
retrospect as if little happened in the earlier part of the 1950s; even the Korean War seemed to
evanesce, at least in the eyes of those who were not conscripted. The thunder began to gather
in the distance, with the squashed liberation movement in Hungary in 1956, and then the Suez
Canal crisis in 1957, and finally the launch of the first Sputnik, which awoke a complex of fears
in America. After the inauguration of John F. Kennedy as president in 1961 the rush of events
was headlong. The civil rights movement, which had been gathering strength since the
enforced integration of the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957,
achieved momentum under the leadership of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Marches, sit-
ins, and voter-registration campaigns were conducted, often with violent interference by police
and white mobs, throughout the South but with particular intensity in Alabama and Mississippi.
The aborted invasion of Cuba by American-backed exiles in 1961 was followed by a close brush
with war after a build-up of Soviet missiles on the island was discovered late in 1962. The
United States space program began in earnest with its first manned flight in 1961. The Vietnam
War started almost invisibly, as American advisors were first given permission to respond to fire
with fire in 1962 and then large numbers of troops were sent from the United States in 1963.
On November 22 of that year Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
While all this was going on, American culture was undergoing a crisis of its own.
Hollywood, which had flourished artistically during the 1950s even as its demise was broadly
predicted as a result of the rise of television, issuing such spectacular if often unlikely films as
Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without a Cause, Orson Welles's Touch of Evil, Billy
Wilder's Some Like It Hot, and Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, saw in the new decade
with Hitchcock's traumatic Psychoand then seemed to roll over and expire. Popular music was
inert, and even jazz was undergoing an uneasy period of transition. Not much was occurring in
literature, with the single if impressive exception of Thomas Pynchon's strange and daunting
novel V. The one real area of concentrated activity was visual art. In 1962 the mass audience
woke up to Pop art, which it both understood and did not. The work of Claes Oldenburg, Andy
Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and their contemporaries Robert Rauschenberg
and Jasper Johns was able to appall the bourgeoisie, perhaps the last time this reactive body was
taken unawares and cared enough to show its confusion. Pop art, among its other achievements,
fed back to American culture its own vacuity in altered form, making its emptiest images both
exhilarating and deadly.
This was a strong strategy not all that distant from Robert Frank's, and by then younger
photographers could understand the connection. Garry Winogrand's street scenes, zoo crowds,
and jagged two-shots, which had been building over the last half of the previous decade, made
perfect sense as portraits of the shell-shocked and anomic society, wandering through public
structures with no clear destination (pages 227 and 245). Lee Friedlander's implacable shadow
attempted to prove its own existence, and his oddly silent urban landscapes seemed like pictures
of an abandoned country (page 242). Diane Arbus, meanwhile, took portraits of the last
humans. Her people were the ones August Sander, at the end of his exhaustive typology of
humanity, could not have foreseen or imagined. They were the final, conclusive products of the
twentieth century, inheritors of progress, war, commerce, mass culture, and all the rest of it. If
they had never been seen before, it was maybe because they hadn't existed (page 237).
If there was anything at all outside this purview, it was to be found in the rapidly shrink
ing and gravely imperiled wilderness. The best-selling nonfiction book of 1962 was Rachel
Carson's Silent Spring , which was the first loud warning of the danger the earth faced to be
heard in America, and that same year Eliot Porter's In Wilderness Is the Preservation of the World
became one of the largest-selling books of photographs in the nation's history. It took many
years for either of them to have a noticeable effect, and yet they could hardly be said to be ahead
of their time, since the despoilment and pollution of the environment was already then in an
advanced state. Maybe it was simply that each canceled out the other or that the consumers who
paid their money believed in that action as a magical rite that would fix everything.
It might seem that twentieth-century America was invented by its photographers, that
each shot was not so much a record as a prediction, or an enactment. It is hard to imagine the
century's history without these photographs, even if their direct relationship to history — wars,
droughts, inventions, and fads — is not always obvious. The United States has made itself up of
images, and it has a stock of photographic icons that it will replay when it feels uncertain of its
own identity. The raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, Marilyn Monroe holding her skirt down as
the rising steam attempts to blow it upward, Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, Dorothea
Lange's migrant mother — these are totems of the American nation. The history they recorded
has now entered these photographs, where it hangs suspended. The course of photography in
the United States has at least in the twentieth century engaged in a relationship with this civic
religion that has alternated constantly among acceptance, denial, challenge, and disregard. The
nation has gradually learned to respond by absorbing all photographic images, granting them
equal citizenship. Photography, by nature the most democratic art, has no choice but to accept.

Notes

1. Quoted in John Szarkowski, Photography Until Now
(New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1989), p. 144.
2. Quoted in Webster'sAmerican Biographies (Springfield,
Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1984), p. 221.
3. Quoted in Andrew Sarris, The Films ofJosef von Sternberg
(New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966), p. 13.
4. Quoted in John Szarkowski, Mirrors and Windows:
American PhotographySince i960 (New York: The Museum
of Modern Art, 1978), p. 19.
William B. Post. Aspens,c. 1905 57
58 Henry Hamilton Bennett. Panoramafrom the Overhanging Cliff, WisconsinDells. 1897-98
Edward S. Curtis. Watchingthe Dancers—Hopi. 1906
Erwin E. Smith. Mounting a Bronc. c. 1910
Adam Clark Vroman. "PuebloofZuni " (Sacred Shrine ofTadyallona). 1899
 £ "is2-

William H. Rau. PicturesqueSusquehanna Near Laceyville.1891-92

Henry Hamilton Bennett. LaytonArt Gallery, Milwaukee, Wisconsin,c. 1890
Edwin Hale Lincoln. Thistle. 1893-1907
Frances Benjamin Johnston. Stairway of Treasurer's Residence,Students at Work, The Hampton Institute, Hampton, Virginia. 1899-1900
L. S. Glover. In the Heart of the CopperCountry, Calumet, Michigan. 1905
^
r mm """

Charles H. Currier. Kitchen in the Vicinityof Boston,Massachusetts,c. 1900

Ernest J. Bellocq. Untitled, c. 1912
Arnold Genthe. Chinatown, San Francisco.1896-1906
Jacob Riis. Bandits' Roost,59 'A Mulberry Street, c. 1888
Lewis W. Hine. Coalbreakers,Pennsylvania. 1910-11
Darius Kinsey. Felling a Fir Free, 51 Feet in Circumference. 1906
Willard Worden. Market Street, San Francisco.April 18, 1906
Charles Norman Sladen. Page from a personal album titled "July 1913," made at Great Chebeague Island, Maine. 1913 77
5® .I*" " V* "3

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Photographer Unknown.
SeventhAvenue, 42nd and 43rd Streets, New YorkCity. View,Facing North, Along WestSide of SeventhAvenue, Showing Sidewalk Conditions.1914
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Arthur S. Mole and John D. Thomas. The Human U.S. Shield: 30,000 Officers and Men. Camp Custer, Battle Creek, Michigan. 1918 79
Edward Steichen. Moonrise—Mamaroneck, New York.1904
Edward Steichen. Self-Portrait, Milwaukee. 1898
Alfred Stieglitz. Flatiron Building. 1903
Gertrude Kasebier. The Manger. 1899
Edward Steichen. Midnight —Rodin'sBalzac. 1908
 I

86 John G. Bullock. Untitled, c. 1910

Clarence H. White. New England Street. 1907
Gertrude Kasebier. The Road to Rome. 1903
Clarence H. White. Mrs. ClarenceH. White. 1906
 <V\

George H. Seeley. Winter Landscape. 1909

Alvin Langdon Coburn. Grand Canyon. 1911
Alfred Stieglitz. The Mauretania. 1910
Clarence H. White. The Skeletonof the Ship, Bath, Maine. 1917
Laura Gilpin. Ghost Rock. 1919
Doris Ulmann. Untitled, c. 1930
Edward Steichen . Alfred Stieglitz. 1909-10
Alfred Stieglitz. Picasso-BraqueExhibition at "291" 1915
Paul Strand. Untitled. 1915
Paul Strand. Untided. c. 1915
 C' *

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Charles Sheeler. White Bam, BucksCounty, Pennsylvania. 1914-17

102 Charles Sheeler. Stair Well. 1914-17
Paul Strand. LeavesII. 1929
-104 Edward Steichen. Pillars of the Parthenon. 1921
Alfred Stieglitz. Hands and Thimble—Georgia O'Keeffe. 1920 105
 *

Edward Weston. Torsoof Neil. 1925

Tina Modotti. Roses,Mexico. 1924
Edward Weston. Nahni Olin. 1924
Tina Modotti. Worker'sHands. 1926
Edward Weston. Pepper No. 50. 1930
Imogen Cunningham. Nude. 1932
Charles Sheeler. Cactusand Photographer'sLamp, New York.193 1
Alfred Stieglitz. Applesand Gable, Lake George. 1922
Paul Strand. Gaston Lachaise. 1927-28
Edward Weston. Dunes, Oceano. 1936
Ansel Adams. Lake MacDonald, Glacier National Park. 1942
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Ansel Adams. Old Faithful Geyser.
; Yellowstone
National Park. 1942
Ansel Adams. Old Faithful Geyser,
; Yellowstone
National Park. 1942
 14.3/4.

Paul Outerbridge. Ide Collar. 1922

Grancel Fitz. Cellophane.1928-29
Nickolas Muray. Babe Ruth (GeorgeHerman Ruth), c. 1927
 a> •wA#
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Edward Steichen. Gloria Swanson. 1924 125

Baron Adolf De Meyer. Green and Silver Leaves. 1925
Photographer Unknown. Film Still for "The CommonLaw 1931
~ • x. 4 ,* "i

James Van Der Zee. Baptism Celebrationto Maria Warma Mercado. April 23, 1927
#T , "/

Lewis W. Hine. Steamfitter. 1920

Photographer Unknown. CoronadoBeach,California, c. 1930
James Bartlett Rich. Stopping Offfor Lunch, Route 143, The Ontelaunee Creek, Near Kempton,Berks County,Pennsylvania. 1931
Walker Evans. Tom Movie Poster. 1930
134 Berenice Abbott. El at ColumbusAvenue and Broadway. 1929
Walker Evans. BrooklynBridge. 1929
t
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Dorothea Lange. Street Demonstration, Francisco.1933

Walker Evans. City Lunch Counter. 1929
Walker Evans. Maine Pump. 1933
Ralph Steiner. American Rural Baroque. 1930
m 91

Walker Evans. Graveyard, Houses,and Steel Mill, Bethlehem,Pennsylvania. 1935

A.ESPOSITO

Ralph Steiner. Sign, Saratoga Springs. 1929

 CARL LAEMMIE

PRESTON
FOSTER

Walker Evans. Housesand Billboardsin Atlanta. 1936

Berenice Abbott. Zito's Bakery, BleeckerStreet, New York.1937
Walker Evans. Penny Picture Display,Savannah, Georgia. 1936
Walker Evans. Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer Wife. 1936
Dorothea Lange. Back. 1938
Dorothea Lange. The Road West, New Mexico. 1938
 ait

Dorothea Lange. Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California. 1936

 Margaret Bourke- White. At the Time of the LouisvilleFlood. 1937
i
Louise Dahl-Wolfe. Nashville. 1932
Russell Lee. Lumberjacks—Saturday Night, Minnesota. 1937
 GA N O

Wright Morris. Gano Grain Elevator.; WesternKansas. 1939

 HOT
COFFEE
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Edward Weston. Hot Coffee,Mojave Desert. 1937

Rudy Burckhardt. Facing pages from a unique album titled "An Afternoon in Astoria." 1940
Walker Evans. Subway Portrait. 1938-41
Helen Levitt. New York.1939
Andre Kertesz. Railroad Station, Poughkeepsie,New York.1937
Helen Levitt. New York.1939
John Gutmann. Jitterbug, New Orleans. 1937
Lisette Model. ConeyIsland. 1941
Barbara Morgan. Merce Cunningham.—TotemAncestor. 1942
George Piatt Lynes. Marc Blit.zst.ein,Orson Welles,and Lehman Engle. 1937
<erous
Weegee (Arthur Fellig). BrooklynSchoolChildren See Gambler Murdered in Street. 1941
Weegee (Arthur Fellig). Harry Maxwell Shot in Car. 1936
 V

168 Gjon Mili. Cafe Society,New York.1943-47

U.S. Navy. ExplosionFollowingHit on the USS Franklin by Japanese Dive Bomber.March 19, 1945 169
Dorothea Lange. San Francisco,c. 1942
U.S. Army Signal Corps. Russian Slave Laborer Points Out Former Nazi Guard Who Brutally Beat Prisoners. April 14, 1945 171
Harry Callahan. Chicago,c. 1950 173
George Piatt Lynes. Self-Analysis, c. 1940
 OlRTRUOf
GEDDES
WILLIS
BurialinssiwICE

DENTI

Clarence John Laughlin. The Eye That Never Sleeps. 1946

Frederick Sommer. Max Emst. 1946
Aaron Siskind. Gloucester.1944
K .A

Clarence John Laughlin. The Insect-HeadedTombstone.1953

Harry Callahan. Eleanor, c. 1947
Harry Callahan. Eleanor, Chicago. 1949
182 Harry Callahan. Detroit. 1943
Harry Callahan. Collages,c. 1956
Edward Weston. North Shore, Point Lobos,California. 1946
Minor White. Pacific.1947
186 Ansel Adams. Aspens, Northern New Mexico. 1958
Eliot Porter. Treesand Pond, Near Sherborn, Massachusetts.1957 187
188 Aaron Siskind. Martha's Vineyard. 1954
I , ,

Paul Strand. Church. 1944

William A. Garnett. Dry Washwith Alluvium, Death Valley,California. 1957
Aaron Siskind. Chicago. 1949
 BBSBB Essssnssssss
w\ ">g#5P,'a*>yu

John Szarkowski. Column Capital, Guaranty Building, Buffalo. 1952

Irving Penn. GeorgeJean Nathan and H. L. Mencken. 1947
Irving Penn. Still Life with Watermelon. 1947
Irving Penn. Regine (Balenciaga Suit). 1950
W. Eugene Smith. Untitled, from "Country Doctor." 1948
Charles Harbutt. Blind Boy. 1961
JSP,
ws<-
Gordon Parks. Harlem Gang Wars. 1948
200 W. Eugene Smith. WelshMiners. 1950
David Douglas Duncan. Korea. 1950
202 Jerome Liebling. 5oy and Car, New YorkCity. 1948
Dorothea Lange. Spring in Berkeley.195 1
Robert Frank. Parade, Valencia.1952
Roy DeCarava. Untitled. 1955
Roy DeCarava. Self-Portrait. 1956
Louis Faurer. GeorgeBarrows in Robert Frank's Loft. 1947
Robert Frank. Street Line, New York.1951
Harry Callahan. Chicago. 1950
Robert Rauschenberg. Untitled. 1949
Walter Chappell. Number 10. 1958
Paul Caponigro. Untitled. 1957
Minor White. PeeledPaint. 1959
mm

Robert Frank. Parade, Hoboken,New Jersey. 1955

Robert Frank. Rem, Nevada. 1956
Robert Frank. LosAngeles. 1955-56
Ted Croner. Untitled. 1947-49
 mam

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William Klein. Gun, Gun, Gun, New York.1955

220 Dan Weiner. ShoppersGlimpsea Movie Star at Grand Central Station, New York.1953
Louis Faurer. Untitled. 1950
Philip Elliott. Bar-B-Q. 1952 or earlier
 I**

Leon Levinstein. ConeyIsland. 1953 or earlier 223

 j .y.

William Klein. MoscowBeach. 1959

John Swope. Cap d'Antibes, France. 1948
 tfUMIK/jfc
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226 Bruce Davidson. Untitled, from the series Teenagers. 1959

Garry Winogrand. LosAngeles. 1964
Charles Hoff. RockyMarciano and Ezzard Charles. 1954
Richard Avedon. Dovima with Elephants. 1955
 V ..'-v/v

230 Richard Avedon. Brigitte Bardot. 1959

mLUiuiiimr

Elliott Erwitt. New York.1964

O. Winston Link. Hot Shot East Bound at lager.; WestVirginia. 1956
Ralph Bartholomew. KodakAdvertisement, c. 1950
234 Charles Moore. Birmingham, Alabama. 1963
Gordon Parks. Harlem Rally. 1963
Diane Arbus. Boywith a Straw Hat Waiting to March in a Pro-War Parade, New YorkCity. 1967
Simpson Kalisher. Untitled. 1961
Elliott Erwitt. FontainebleauHotel, Miami Beach. 1962
BHHHHHHHi

Garry Winogrand. Dallas. 1964

 'L^ kLkiillki —-
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Lee Friedlander. Cincinnati. 1963

Lee Friedlander. New YorkCity. 1964
 * - «

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Diane Arbus. Child with ToyHand Grenade in Central Park, Nira;bor&C/Yy.1962

Irwin Klein. MinneapolisFire. 1962
'f:-*
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Garry Winogrand. Park Avenue, New York.1959

Diane Arbus. TeenageCoupleon Hudson Street, New YorkCity. 1963
I

Lee Friedlander. Galax, Virginia. 1962

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i973-
List of Plates Aspens, Northern New Mexico. Ernest J. Bellocq Harry Callahan
born 1912
849 !95 i8
9/i6" Gelatin-silver print. 14Y16x i7
Untitled, c. 1912 Detroit. 1943
(36 x 44.6 cm). Gift of Shirley C. Gelatin-silver printing-out-paper Gelatin-silver print. 3'A x 4 'A" (8.9 x
Burden
print, printed by Lee Friedlander, 11.5 cm). Purchase
Page 186
7/i6"
3A 1966-69. 9 x7 (24 x 19.6 cm). Page 182
Mr. and Mrs. John Spencer Fund
The plates are listed alphabetically by Eleanor, c. 1947
Page 71
3/9s"
i6 photographer and chronologically Diane Arbus Gelatin-silver print. 4 x3
I923_I
97 under each photographer's name. I (11.6 x 8.5 cm). Acquired with
Works whose authors are unidenti matching funds from the Joseph G.
Child with ToyHand Grenade in Henry Hamilton Bennett
fied appear at the end of the list. For Mayer Foundation, Inc., and the
Central Park , New York City. 1843-1908
photographers who were born out National Endowment for the Arts
1962
side the United States, the country of Layton Art Gallery, Milwaukee, Page 180
7/i6 Gelatin-silver print. 8 x 7'A"
birth and the date of arrival in the Wisconsin, c. 1890
(21.3 x 18.4 cm). Purchase Eleanor, Chicago. 1949
3A" United States are noted after the Albumen-silver print. 17I/16x 2i
9/Mi6 Page 243 Gelatin-silver print. 7V2x 9
name. In the dimensions, height pre (43.6 x 55.3 cm). Gift of the H. H.
(19.1 x 24.3 cm). Purchase
cedes width. All works are in the col Teenage Couple on Hudson Street, Bennett Studio
Page 181
lection of The Museum of Modern New York City. 1963 Page 63
/i Art, New York. The number of the Gelatin-silver print. 15 3 6 x i$Vs" Chicago, c. 1950
Panorama from the Overhanging
9/ni6 page on which the plate appears is (38.5 x 38.2 cm). Purchase Gelatin-silver print. 7% x 9
Cliff, WisconsinDells. 1897-98
noted at the end of each entry. Page 246 (19.4 x 24.3 cm). Purchase
Gelatin-silver printing-out-paper
Page 173
3/i6 Boy with a Straw Hat Waiting to print. 17 x 58^2" (43.2 x 148.6 cm).
March in a Pro-War Parade, Gift of the H. H. Bennett Studio Chicago. 1950
3/fti6
4 New York City. 1967 Pages38-39 Gelatin-silver print. 9 x i3
5/s" Gelatin-silver print. 15 x i4 (38 x (23.3 x 34.8 cm). Purchase
37 cm). Gift of the photographer Page 209
Berenice Abbott Margaret Bourke-White
Page 247 Collages, c. 1956
1898-1991 1904-1 97 1
Gelatin-silver print. 71Vi6 x 10'A"
El at Columbus Avenue and At the Time of the Louisville (19.5x2 4.6 cm). Acquired with
Broadway. 1929 Richard Avedon
Flood. 1937 matching funds from Shirley C.
/3/i6
3As" Gelatin-silver print. 6'/s x 8 born 1923 Gelatin-silver print. 9 x 13 3 " Burden and the National
(15.6 x 21.2 cm). Purchase (24.7 x 33.4 cm). Gift of the Endowment for the Arts
Dovima with Elephants. 1955
Page 134 photographer Page 183
1/s" Gelatin-silver print. igV\6 x i5
Zito 's Bakery, Bleecker Street , (48.4 x 38.2 cm). Gift of the Page 149
New York. 1937 photographer
Gelatin-silver print. 9V2x jVi6" Page 229 Paul Caponigro
(24.1 x 18.9 cm). Given anonymously John G. Bullock born 1932
54-i939 Brigitte Bardot. 1959 i8
Page 143 Untitled. 1957
Gelatin-silver print. 23 '/s x 20" (58.7 x
9/i6
M 50.6 cm). Gift of the photographer Untitled, c. 1910 Gelatin-silver print. jV» x 9
Page 230 Platinum print. 6V»x pVxe" (15.5 x (19.3 x 24.3 cm). Purchase
Ansel Adams 19.8 cm). Gift of the Estate of John Page 212
1902-1984 Emlen Bullock
Lake MacDonald , Glacier Ralph Bartholomew Page 86
National Park. 1942 dates unknown Walter Chappell
Gelatin-silver print. 7'/i6 x 9 'A" (18 x born 1925
Kodak Advertisement, c.1950 Rudy Burckhardt
24.1 cm). Gift of David H. McAlpin Number 10. 1958
Gelatin-silver print. 15 '/2 x 19'A" born Switzerland 1914, to U.S. 1935
7/i6 Page ii"] Gelatin-silver print. io x 13'A"
(39.2 x 49.5 cm). Gift of John C.
Old Faithful Geyser.;Yellowstone Waddell Facing pages from a unique (26.4 x 33.5 cm). Gift of the
National Park. 1942 Page 233 album titled "An Afternoon in photographer
Gelatin-silver print. 9V16x 6V2" Astoria." 1940 Page 211
(23.6 x 16.4 cm). Gift of David H. Four gelatin-silver prints, each
McAlpin 6'/2 x 41/2"(16.4 x 11.4 cm). Given
Page 120 anonymously Alvin Langdon Coburn
Pages 194 and 199 1882-1966
Old Faithful Geyser,;Yellowstone
National Park. 1942 Grand Canyon. 1911
/i
5/i6" Gelatin-silver print. 9V16x 6 (23 x Platinum print. 16 3 6 x 12'A" (41 x
16 cm). Gift of David H. McAlpin 31.6 cm). David H. McAlpin Fund
Page 121 Page 9 1
248
 Ted Croner Roy DeCarava New York. 1964 Louis Faurer
7/i6" born 1922 born 1919 Gelatin-silver print. 13A16x i9 born 1916
(33.5 x 49.4 cm). Gift of the George Barrows in Robert Frank's
Untitled. 1947-49 Untitled. 1955
photographer Loft. 1947
/s
A Gelatin-silver print. 15 7 x 15 3 " Gelatin-silver print. 8 Vsx 13A2"
(20.6 x 34.3 cm). John Parkinson III Page 251 Gelatin-silver print. 12% x 8'A"
(40.3 x 40 cm). The Family of Man
Fund Fund (32.1 x 21.6 cm). The Ben Schultz
Page 205 Memorial Collection. Gift of the
Walker Evans photographer
Self-Portrait. 1956 1903-1975 Page 207
n/i6" Gelatin-silver print. ioVs x i3
Imogen Cunningham Brooklyn Bridge. 1929
(25.7 x 34.7 cm). Purchase Untided. 1950
1/2
,t 1883-1976 Gelatin-silver print. 8 Asx 5
Pave 206 Gelatin-silver print. 9 x 13A8"(22.9 x
(22.4 x 13.8 cm). Mr. and Mrs. John 34.1 cm). John Parkinson III Fund
Nude. 1932
Spencer Fund
7/5i6
Ms Gelatin-silver print. 6 x 9
Baron Adolf De Meyer Page 1
(16.8 x 23.9 cm). Gift of Albert M.
Bender 1868-1946 City Lunch Counter. 1929
3/s" born Germany, to U.S. 1914 Gelatin-silver print. 4 'A x 6 (10.8 x Grancel Fitz
16.2 cm). Gift of the photographer 1894-1963
Green and Silver Leaves. 1925
Page 133 Cellophane. 1928-29
Gelatin-silver print. 9 'A x 7'A"
Charles H. Currier
(24.1 x 19 cm). Gift of Anne Tom Movie Poster. 1930 Gelatin-silver print. 9A16x 7A16"
1851-1938
3/s"
s Ehrenkranz in honor of Samuel J. Gelatin-silver print. 6 x 4 (23.3 x 19.3 cm). John Parkinson III
Kitchen in the Vicinity of Boston, Wagstaff, Jr. (16.2 x 11.2 cm). Purchase Fund
Massachusetts, c. 1900 Pave 126 Page 133 Page 123
Gelatin-silver print. 7V4x 9 As" (19.6 x
Maine Pump. 1933
25 cm). Gift of Ernst Halberstadt
3/4
M Gelatin-silver print. 7 As x 5 (20 x Robert Frank
Page no David Douglas Duncan
14.5 cm). Gift of the photographer born Switzerland 1924, to U.S. 1947
born 1916
Page 138
Korea. 1950 Street Line, New York. 1951
Edward S. Curtis Graveyard, Houses, and Steel Mill ,
13
A6
/i6
lA Gelatin-silver print. 13 7 x g Gelatin-silver print. i2 x 8A16"
1868-1954 Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. 1935
(34.1 x 23.2 cm). Gift of the (32.5 x 21.8 cm). Purchase
/i Gelatin-silver print. 713 6 x 9A16"
Watching the Dancers— Hopi. photographer Page 208
(19.5 x 24.3 cm). Gift of the Farm
1906
Security Administration Parade, Valencia. 1952
From The North American Indian.
Page 130 Gelatin-silver print. 17A16x 25"
5/i6" Photogravure. 15V8x n (38.4 x
(43.3 x 63.5 cm). Purchase
28.7 cm). Gift of Jean-Anthony Harold Edgerton Houses and Billboards in Atlanta. Page 204
36 du Lac 1903-1990 t9
Page 60 with Kenneth Germeshausen Gelatin-silver print. 6 'A x gVs" U.S. Number 61, Texas. 1955
nu/i6 (16.5 x 23.2 cm). Purchase Gelatin-silver print. i2 x 8Ai6
Dangerous Weapon. 1936
Page 14.2 (32.2 x 21.4 cm). Purchase
Gelatin-silver print. 9 Asx 13" (25.1 x
Louise Dahl-Wolfe Frontispiece
32.9 cm). Gift of the photographer Penny Picture Display, Savannah ,
born 1895
Page 165 Georgia. 1936 Parade, Hoboken, New Jersey.
95 Nashville. 1932 Gelatin-silver print. 8 As x 7" (22 x I 5
!/s" Gelatin-silver print. 12As x 9 17.7 cm). Gift of Willard Van Dyke Gelatin-silver print. 8 Asx 12 Ai6"
(32.7 x 23.1 cm). Gift of the Philip Elliott Page 144 (20.6 x 31.2 cm). Purchase
photographer 1903-1985 Page 215
Page 150
Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer
Bar-B-Q. 1952 or earlier Wife. 1936 LosAngeles. 1955-56
/i6
,3 Gelatin-silver print. 8 x 131/16' Gelatin-silver print. 9 As x 7 As" Gelatin-silver print. 13Ai6x SVu"
(22.3 x 33.2 cm). Gift of Virginia (24.4 x 19.5 cm). Gift of the (33.1 x 21.7 cm). Purchase
Bruce Davidson
Cuthbert Elliott photographer Page 217
born 1933
Page 145 Reno, Nevada. 1956
Untitled, from the series
A«"
13 Subway Portrait. 1938-41 Gelatin-silver print. 8 Asx i2
Teenagers. 1959
Gelatin-silver print. 3% x 5'A" (9.7 x (21.2 x 32.5 cm). Purchase
3A Gelatin-silver print. 6 x 10" (17.1 x Elliott Erwitt
13.4 cm). Purchase Pave 216
25.4 cm). Purchase born 1928
Page 226 Page 156
Fontainebleau Hotel, Miami
Beach. 1962
Gelatin-silver print. 13A8x 19 'A
(33.9 x 48.8 cm). Gift of the
photographer
Page 259 249
 Lee Friedlander John Gutmann Simpson Kalisher Dorothea Lange
born 1934 born Germany 1905, to U.S. 1933 born 1926 1895—
1965
Galax , Virginia. 1962 Jitterbug , New Orleans. 1937 Untitled. 1961 Street Demonstration ,
/73«"
hV
s Gelatin-silver print. 5 x8 Gelatin-silver print. 8 Vs x 7 Vs" (22 x Gelatin-silver print. i3 x9 San Francisco. 1933
(14.9 x 22.5 cm). Gift of 19.3 cm). Barbara Ferry Hooker (34 x 23.3 cm). Purchase Gelatin-silver print. 17 x 9V4" (43.1 x
Mrs. Armand P. Bartos Fund Page 238 23.4 cm). Purchase
Page 247 Page 160 Page 136

Cincinnati. 1963 Migrant Mother, Nipomo,

Gertrude Kasebier
Gelatin-silver print. 9 x 6" (22.8 x California. 1936
Charles Harbutt 1852-1934
9/i6
/i6"
15 15.2 cm). Purchase Gelatin-silver print. i2 x9
born 1935
Page 241 The Manger. 1899 (31.9 x 25.2 cm). Purchase
3/4 Blind Boy. 1961 Platinum print. i2 x 9V2" (32.4 x Page 148
New YorkCity. 1964
s/7i6"
s Gelatin-silver print. 8 x i3 24.1 cm). Gift of Mrs. Hermine M.
3/t"
s Gelatin-silver print. 6 x9 Back. 1938
(22.6 x 33.8 cm). Gift of the Turner
(16.2 x 24.8 cm). Purchase Gelatin-silver print, printed by
photographer Page 84
7/5s"
s Page 242 James Welcher, 1965. i2 x8
Page 19y
The Road to Rome. 1903 (32 x 22.6 cm). Purchase
/i6 Platinum print. 8'/4 x 13 5 " (21 x Page 146
William A. Garnett 33.7 cm). Gift of Mrs. Hermine M.
Lewis W. Hine The Road West, New Mexico.
born 1916 Turner
38 1874-1940 t9
Page 88
5/s Dry Wash with Alluvium , Death Gelatin-silver print. 9 x ip/s"
Coalbreakers, Pennsylvania. (24.5 x 33.2 cm). Gift of the
Valley, California. 1957
1910-1 1
n/i6 Gelatin-silver print. I9 x 13V2" photographer
Gelatin-silver print. 4%6 x 6"/i6" Andre Kertesz
(50 x 39.4 cm). Gift of the Page 143
(1 1.6 x 17 cm). Gift of John C. 1894-1985
photographer
Waddell born Hungary, to U.S. 1936 San Francisco, c. 1942
Page 190
Page -j4 Gelatin-silver print, printed by
Railroad Station, Poughkeepsie,
7/i6
s" James Welcher, 1965. io x9
Steamfitter. 1920 New York. 1937
(26.5 x 25 cm). Purchase
Arnold Genthe Gelatin-silver print. 9'/2 x 7" (24.2 x Gelatin-silver print. 9V2 x 7V4" (24 x
Page 170
1869-1942 17.8 cm). Purchase 19.6 cm). Gift of the photographer
born Germany, to U.S. 1895 Page 129 Page 138 Spring in Berkeley. 1951
/i Gelatin-silver print. 7 15 6 x ioVV
Chinatown , San Francisco. 1896- (20.1 x 25.5 cm). Purchase
1906
Charles Hoff Darius Kinsey Page 203
5//ii6" Gelatin-silver print. 7 13 6 x i3
died 1975 1869-1945
(19.8 x 33.8 cm). Gift of the
photographer RockyMarciano and Ezzard Felling a Fir Tree, 51 Feet in
Clarence John Laughlin
Page 72 Charles. 1954 Circumference. 1906
1905-1985
7/9i6"
i6 Gelatin-silver print. 7 x9 Gelatin-silver print. 13 Ui6 x ioVs"
(19.2 x 24 cm). The Family of Man (34 x 26.4 cm). Given anonymously The Eye That Never Sleeps. 1946
Laura Gilpin Fund Page 75 Gelatin-silver print. 12 Vs x 8V4"
1891-1979 Page 228 (31.4 x 22.2 cm). Purchase
Page 179
Ghost Rock. 1919
Irwin Klein
5/s Platinum print. 9 x 7VV (24.5 x The Insect-Headed Tombstone.
974
-I
933 Clifton Johnson I
19.2 cm). Acquired with matching 195 3
1865-1940
s/s funds from Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Minneapolis Fire. 1962 Gelatin-silver print. i3 x xoVs"
3rd and the National Endowment Barred Door, RockyHill Meeting Gelatin-silver print. 9 '/8 x 13 'A" (34.6 x 27.7 cm). John Parkinson III
for the Arts House, c. 1910 (23.2 x 34.3 cm). Purchase Fund
3A Page 94 Gelatin-silver print. 6 x 4V4" Page 244 Page 179
(17. 1 x 12 cm). Purchase
Page 63
L. S. Glover William Klein Russell Lee
dates unknown born 1928 1903-1986
Frances Benjamin Johnston Lumberjacks — Saturday Night,
In the Heart of the Copper Gun, Gun, Gun, New York. 1955
1864-1952
5/M i6 Country, Calumet , Michigan. Gelatin-silver print. 9V2 x i3 Minnesota. 1937
5/i6 1905 Stairway of Treasurer's Residence, (24.2 x 33.8 cm). The Fellows of Gelatin-silver print. 7 x 9V2"
Gelatin-silver print. 7 x 56 V16" Students at Work, The Hampton Photography Fund (18.6 x 24.1 cm). Gift of the Farm
)- (17.8 x 143.7 cm Lois and Bruce Institute , Hampton, Virginia. Page 2 19 Security Administration
Zenkel Fund 1899-1900 Page 131
Moscow Beach. 1959
Pages 68-69 From The Hampton Album . Platinum
7/3M s
i6 Gelatin-silver print. i5 x i9
7/i6" 250 print. 7 '/2 x 9 (19 x 24 cm). Gift
(39 x 49.3 cm). Purchase
of Lincoln Kirstein
Page 224
Page 67
 Leon Levinstein Self-Analysis, c. 1940 Barbara Morgan Irving Penn
1913-1988 Gelatin-silver print. 9 x -jVC (23 x 1900- 199 2 born 1917
18.9 cm). Given anonymously GeorgeJean Nathan and
Coney Island. 1953 or earlier Merce Cunningham —Totem
Page 174 H. L. Mencken. 1947
/ni6" Gelatin-silver print. i^Ax I3 Ancestor. 1942
3/9n8"
si6"
i6 (35.2 x 34.8 cm). Purchase Gelatin-silver print. i8 x i3 Gelatin-silver print. I9 x i5
Page 225 (46.9 x 33.9 cm). Gift of Harriette (50 x 39.5 cm). Gift of the
Gjon Mili and Noel Levine in honor of photographer
1904-1984
Richard E. Oldenburg Page 193
born Albania, to U.S. 1923
Helen Levitt Page 162
Still Life with Watermelon. 1947
born 1913 Cafe Society, New York. 1943-47
7/8" Dye-transfer print. 24 x i9 (61 x
M
/i6 Gelatin-silver print. 19I/4x 155
New York. 1939 50.5 cm). Gift of the photographer
(50.1 x 38.8 cm). Purchase Wright Morris
A" Gelatin-silver print. 7 x 8 l (17.8 x Page 194
born 1910
2 1 cm). The Ben Schultz Memorial
Regine (Balenciaga Suit). 1950
Collection. Gift of the photographer Gano Grain Elevator, Western
3/s" Gelatin-silver print. 7% x 7
Page 157 Kansas. 1939
Lisette Model (18.7 x 18.7 cm). Gift of the
A" Gelatin-silver print. 9V2 x 7 }
New York. 1939 1906-1983 photographer
(24.1 x 19.7 cm). Purchase
7/8" Gelatin-silver print. 6V2 x 8 born Austria, to U.S. 1938 Page 193
Page 192
(16.6 x 22.6 cm). Gift of James
Thrall Soby
Coney Island. 1941
Gelatin-silver print. 13 Vi x 11'
Page 159 Eliot Porter
(34.2 x 28 cm). Photography Nickolas Muray
1901-1990
Purchase Fund 1892-1965
Pave 161 born Hungary, to U.S. 191 3 Trees and Pond, Near Sherbom,
Jerome Liebling
Massachusetts. 1957
born 1924 Babe Ruth (George Herman
3/t Dye-transfer print. io x 8'/4"
Ruth), c. 1927
Boy and Car.; New York City. 1948 Tina Modotti (27.3 x 20.9 cm). Gift of David H.
/i Gelatin-silver print. 13 5 6 x ioW
Gelatin-silver print. 10 x 10" (25.4 x 1896-1942 McAlpin
(33.8 x 26.7 cm). Gift of
25.4 cm). Mrs. Charles Liebman born Italy, to U.S. 191 3 Page 187
Mrs. Nickolas Muray
Fund
Roses,Mexico. 1924 Page 124
Platinum print. jVs x 8 'A" (18.7 x
William B. Post
21.6 cm). Gift of Edward Weston
1857-1925
Page 107 Arnold Newman
Edwin Hale Lincoln
born 1918 Aspens, c. 1905
1848-1938 Worker's Hands. 1926 Platinum print. 7V9x 9'/a" (18.8 x
Gelatin-silver print. 7% x 8'/2" Jacob and Gwen Lawrence. 1944
Thistle. 1893-1907 23.2 cm). The Family of Man Fund
(18.8 x 21.6 cm). Given anonymously Gelatin-silver print. 9 5A x 7 '/a"
Platinum print. 13I/8 x ioVs" (33.2 Page 37
Page 109 (24.4 x 19.4 cm). Purchase
25.7 cm). Purchase
Page 163
Page 66
William H. Rau
Arthur S. Mole and John D. 1855-1920
Thomas Paul Outerbridge
O. Winston Link
dates unknown 1896-1959 Picturesque Susquehanna Near
born 191 1
Laceyville. 1891-92
The Human U.S. Shield: 30,000 Ide Collar. 1922
Hot Shot East Bound at lager.; Albumen-silver print. 17V8x 20V2"
/s" Officersand Men. Camp Custer, Platinum print. 4V2x 3 5 (11.4 x
West Virginia. 1956 (43.5 x 52 cm). David H. McAlpin
Battle Creek, Michigan. 1918 9.2 cm). Gift of the photographer
Gelatin-silver print, printed 1976. Fund
5/Ai6" Gelatin-silver print. 12 3 x io Page 64
5/8
M ioVs x i3 (27 x 34.3 cm).
(32.5 x 26.2 cm). Gift of Ronald A.
Purchase
Kurtz
Page 242
Page 79 Gordon Parks
Robert Rauschenberg
born 191 2
born 1925
George Piatt Lynes Harlem Gang Wars. 1948
Charles Moore Untitled. 1949
IW-WSS Gelatin-silver print. 11 x io'/z"
s/3si6 born 193 1 Gelatin-silver print. io x9
(27.9 x 26.6 cm). Gift of the photog
Marc Blitzstein, Orson Welles (25.8 x 24.4 cm). Nelson A.
Birmingham, Alabama. 1963 rapher in honor of Edward Steichen
and Lehman Engle. 1937 Rockefeller Fund
3/s Gelatin-silver print. 6 x 9V8" Page 199
Gelatin-silver print. 10V2x 13"
(16.3 x 24.5 cm). Anonymous
(26.7 x 33 cm). Gift of the Harlem Rally. 1963
Purchase Fund
5/i6" photographer Gelatin-silver print. 13'/i6 x i9
Page 234
(33.2 x 49 cm). Gift of the photogra
pher in honor of Edward Steichen
Page 233 251
 James Bartlett Rich Chicago. 1949 Edward Steichen Picasso-Braque Exhibition at
/s" 1866-1942 Gelatin-silver print. 14 x 17 7 1879-1973 "291." 1915
3A" (35.6 x 45.3 cm). Gift of Robert and born Luxembourg, to U.S. 1881 Platinum print. 7'A x 9 (19 x
Stopping Off for Lunch, Route 23.8 cm). Gift of Charles Sheeler
Joyce Menschel Self-Portrait, Milwaukee. 1898
143, The Ontelaunee Creek,
Page 191 Page 97
/s" Near Kempton, Berks County, Platinum print. 7'A x 3 7 (19.6 x
Pennsylvania. 1931 Martha's Vineyard. 1954 9.8 cm). Gift of the photographer Hands and Thimble— Georgia
Gelatin-silver print. 5x8"(i2.7x Gelatin-silver print. 12'A x 16'A" Page 82 O'Keeffe. 1920
20.3 cm). Gift of David H. McAlpin, (31.7 x 42 cm). Purchase Platinum print. gVs x 8" (24.9 x
Moonrise —Mamaroneck,
by exchange 20.2 cm). Gift of David H. McAlpin
New York. 1904
Page 131 Page 103
Platinum and ferro-prussiate print.
3A i5 x 19" (38.9 x 48.2 cm). Gift of Apples and Gable, Lake George.
Charles Norman Sladen the photographer 1922
/s" Jacob Riis 1858-1949 Page 81 Gelatin-silver print. 4 'A x 3 5
1849-1914 born Great Britain, to U.S. 1876 (11.6 x 9.1 cm). Given anonymously
born Denmark, to U.S. 1870 Midnight —Rodin's Balzac. 1908
Page from a personal album Page 114
Pigment print over collotype, with
Bandits' Roost, 59'/ \ Mulberry titled "July 1913," made at hand toning, ii'/sx 14V4"(30 x From the Shelton, West. 1935
Street, c. 1888 Great Chebeague Island, 36.2 cm). Gift of the photographer Gelatin-silver print. 9'A x 7V2"
Gelatin-silver print by Rolf Petersen, Maine. 1913 Page 83 (24.3 x 19 cm). The Alfred Stieglitz
3/i6 1957. i9 x 15^2" (48.6 x 39.4 cm). Gelatin-silver prints with ink draw Collection. Gift of Georgia O'Keeffe
3/M 8 Courtesy of the Museum of the City ings. I 2 Vl6X 2I (30.7 x 54.2 cm). Alfred Stieglitz. 1909-10
Page 118
7/5Ai6"
6 of New York Purchased with funds from The Platinum print. ii x9 (28.7 x
Page 73 Richardson Foundation 24 cm). Gift of the photographer From the Shelton, West. 1935
Page 77 Page 96 Gelatin-silver print. 9V8 x 7V2"
(24.5 x 19.1 cm). The Alfred Stieglitz
Pillars of the Parthenon. 1921
George H. Seeley Collection. Gift of Georgia O'Keeffe
3/As"6 Platinum print. i9 x i3 (48.7 x
1880-1955 Erwin E. Smith Page 119
34.4 cm). Gift of the photographer
Winter Landscape. 1909 1886-1947 Page104
/i Gum-bichromate print. 17 5 6 x Mounting a Bronc. c. 1910 Gloria Swanson. 1924 Paul Strand
9/i6" 21'A" (44 x 54 cm). David H. Gelatin-silver print. iiVi6 x i4 Gelatin-silver print, printed by Rolf 1890-1976
McAlpin Fund and Purchase (28.1 x 37 cm). The Family of Man Petersen, 1961. 16V16x 13^2" (42.1 x
Page 90 Fund Untitled. 1915
34.2 cm). Gift of the photographer
Page 61 Platinum print, io'/s x 12" (25.7 x
Page 123
30.4 cm). Gift of the photographer
Charles Sheeler Page 98
1883-1965 W. Eugene Smith Ralph Steiner Untitled, c. 1915
9A6
M 1918-1978 1899-1986 Platinum print. nVs x 9 (28.2 x
Stair Well. 1914-17
Gelatin-silver print. 9V2x 6Vs" (24.2 x Untitled, from "Country 24.3 cm). Gift of the photographer
Sign, Saratoga Springs. 1929
16.8 cm). Gift of the photographer Doctor." 1948 Page 99
/5s Gelatin-silver print. 9 x 7W
3/s Page 102 Gelatin-silver print. i3 x J0V16 (24.5 x 19.9 cm). Gift of the Akeley Motion Picture Camera.
(33.9 x 25.9 cm). Purchase photographer 2923
White Bam, Bucks County,
5/ss" Page 146 Page 141 Gelatin-silver print. 9 x 7
Pennsylvania. 1914-17
Gelatin-silver print. 7'A x 9 'A" WelshMiners. 1950 (24.5 x 19.5 cm). Gift of the
American Rural Baroque. 1930
(19.1 x 24.2 cm). Gift of the Gelatin-silver print. io'A x 12 "A' photographer
9/\6 Gelatin-silver print. 7 x 9'A"
photographer (26.7 x 32.6 cm). Purchase Page 112
(19.2 x 24.3 cm). Gift of the
Page 101 photographer Gaston Lachaise. 1927-28
n/\V Cactus and Photographer's Lamp, Page 134 Gelatin-silver print. 9V8 x 7
New York. 1931 (24.4 x 19.5 cm). John Parkinson III
Frederick Sommer Fund
5/s" Gelatin-silver print. 9 'A x 6
born Italy 1905, to U.S. 1931 Alfred Stieglitz Page 113
(24.1 x 16.8 cm). Gift of Samuel M.
Kootz Max Ernst. 1946 1864-1946
Leaves II. 1929
5/s Page 113 Gelatin-silver print. 7'A x 9V2" (19 x Flatiron Building. 1903 Platinum print. 9 x 7W (^4-5 x
24.1 cm). Gift of Nelson A. Photogravure on vellum. 12 Vs x 19.8 cm). Gift of Georgia O'Keeffe
5A" Rockefeller 6 (32.8 x 16.9 cm). Purchase Page 103
Aaron Siskind Page 177 Page 83
1903-1991 Church. 1944
Moon Culminations. 1951 The Mauretania. 1910 Gelatin-silver print. 9'A x 7W
5/3/s"
ss Gloucester. 1944 Gelatin-silver print. 9 x 7 Photogravure. i3 x ioW (24.2 x 19.3 cm). Gift of
/34" Gelatin-silver print. 7 x 4 (17.8 x (24.4 x 19.3 cm). Gift of the (34 x 25.9 cm). Purchase Mrs. Armand P. Bartos
12 cm). Gift of Robert and Joyce photographer Page 92
252 Menschel Page 176
Page 178
 John Swope Adam Clark Vroman Dunes, Oceano. 1936 Garry Winogrand
9/i6" died 1979 1856-1916 Gelatin-silver print. 7V2 x 9 (19 x 1928-1984
24.3 cm). Gift of David H. McAlpin LosAngeles. 1964
Cap dAntibes, France. 1948 "Pueblo of Zuni" (Sacred Shrine
Page 116
9/n3/i6
s" Gelatin-silver print. 10V2X i3 of Tadyallona). 1899 Gelatin-silver print. 9 x i3 (22.9 x
(26.7 x 34.4 cm). Gift of the Platinum print. 5% x 8" (15 x Hot Coffee,Mojave Desert. 1937 34 cm). Purchase
photographer 20.3 cm). Acquired by exchange Gelatin-silver print. 7V2 x 9V2" (19 x Page 227
Page 225 Page 62 24.2 cm). Purchase Dallas. 1964
Page 193 Gelatin-silver print. 9 x i^Vs" (22.7 x
North Shore, Point Lobos, 34 cm). Purchased with funds from
John Szarkowski Weegee (Arthur Fellig)
California. 1946 the International Program
born 1925 1899-1968
Gelatin-silver print. 7V2 x 9 Vi" Page 240
born Austria, to U.S. 1909
Column Capital, Guaranty (19. 1 x 24.1 cm). Purchase Park Avenue, New York. 1959
/75i6"
i6
Building, Buffalo. 1952 Harry Maxwell Shot in Car. Page 189. Gelatin-silver print. 2 2 x i4
3/i6" Gelatin-silver print. 10 x i3 2936
(56.7 x 37.8 cm). Gift of the
/i (25.5 x 33.4 cm). Purchase Gelatin-silver print. 13 15 6 x io'/V
photographer
Page 192 (35.4 x 26.6 cm). Gift of the Clarence H. White Page 243
photographer 1871-1925
Page 167
Mrs. Clarence H. White. 1906
Doris Ulmann Willard Worden
3/4 Brooklyn SchoolChildren See Platinum print. 9 x 7VC (24.8 x
1882-1934
Gambler Murdered in Street. 19.7 cm). John Parkinson III Fund dates unknown
Untitled, c. 1930 1941 Page 89 Market Street, San Francisco.
3/n5i6
i6" Platinum print. 8'/s x 6 (20.6 x Gelatin-silver print. io x i3
New England Street. 1907 April 18, 1906
15.7 cm). Purchase (26.2 x 33.5 cm). Given anonymously
5/i6 Platinum print. 9'/2 x 6'/4" (24.1 x Gelatin-silver print. 7 x 9V2"
Page 95 Page 166
15.8 cm). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. (18.5 x 24 cm). David H. McAlpin
Clarence H. White, Jr. Fund
Page 87 Page 76
U.S. Army Signal Corps Dan Weiner
1919-1959 The Skeleton of the Ship, Bath,
Russian Slave Laborer Points Out
Maine. 191 7 Photographer Unknown
Former Nazi Guard Who Shoppers Glimpse a Movie Star
Platinum and gum-bichromate print.
Brutally Beat Prisoners. at Grand Central Station ,
5/8
/V 9 x 12 3 (24.4 x 32.5 cm). Gift of Seventh Avenue, 42nd and 43rd
April 14, 1945 New York. 1953 Streets, New YorkCity. View,
Mr. and Mrs. Clarence H. White, Jr.
7i6
9/3M4i6" Gelatin-silver print. 7 x9 Gelatin-silver print. 9V4 x i3
Page 93 Facing North, Along West Side of
(19.7 x 24.3 cm). Anonymous (23.4 x 34.1 cm). Gift of Sandra
Seventh Avenue, Showing
Purchase Fund Weiner
Sidewalk Conditions. 1914
Page 171 Page 220
Minor White Gelatin-silver print. 7V2 x 9V2"
El Morocco,New York. 1955 1908-1976 (19 x 24 cm). Gift of Barbara
3/s" Gelatin-silver print. gVs x i3 Foshay-Miller
U.S. Navy Pacific. 1947
Page 78
(23.1 x 34 cm). The Family of Man
3/5i6"
s Gelatin-silver print. 6 x8
Explosion Following Hit on the Fund
(16.8 x 20.8 cm). Gift of David H.
USS Franklin byJapanese Dive Page 198
McAlpin Photographer Unknown
Bomber. March 19, 1945
Page 183
u/i6 Gelatin-silver print. io x 13 V2"
Coronado Beach, California.
(27.1 x 34.2 cm). Gift of Edward Edward Weston Peeled Paint. 1959 c. 1930
Steichen 1886-1958
/33/s"
s" Gelatin-silver print. 9V2 x 7 Gelatin-silver print. 4*/4 x 2
Page 169 (24.1 x 18.7 cm). Gift of Robert M.
Nahui Olin. 1924 (10.7 x 6 cm). Lois and Bruce Zenkel
Doty
Gelatin-silver print. 9 x 7" (22.9 x Fund
Page 213
17.7 cm). Purchase Page 130
James Van Der Zee
Page 108
1886-1983
Torsoof Neil. 1925 Photographer Unknown
Baptism Celebration to Maria
Platinum-palladium print. 9'/s x 5 U2"
The Warma Merc ado. April 23, 1927 Film Still for u Common
(23.2 x 14 cm). Purchase
Gelatin-silver print. 7 Vi6 x 9'/2"
Page 106 Law." 1931
(19.2 x 24.1 cm). Gift of Harriette
Gelatin-silver print. 10V2 x i$Vs"
and Noel Levine Pepper No. 30. 1930
(26.7 x 34.7 cm). Purchase
Page 128 Gelatin-silver print. 9V2 x 7V2 ' (24 x
Page 12 7
19 cm). Gift of David H. McAlpin
Page 110
 Kalisher, Simpson, 238
Index Brady, Mathew, 31, 43
Brancusi, Constantin, 15
Evans, Walker, 133, 135, 137,
138, 140, 142, 144, 145, Kasebier, Gertrude, 84, 88; 12,
7> Brandt, Bill, 34, 36, 38 156; 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 13. 2 45
8.6'17' Braque, Georges, 15, 46 25' 2 28 3 34' 3 3 Kazan, Elia, 54
21. Brassai, 31, 36, 38 49' 5°' 5 5 Keaton, Buster, 50
Brecht, Bertolt, 52 Kennedy, John F., 54
Breton, Andre, 52 Faurer, Louis, 22, 207, 221; 23, Keppard, Freddy, 47
Page references to illustrations
4' Brodovitch, Alexey, 52 2 34 Kerouac, Jack, 53
appear in bold type and are listed
Bullock, John G., 86; 45 Fields, Bud, 51 Kertesz, Andre, 39, 158; 23, 36,
together before page references
8 Burckhardt, Rudy, 154, 155; 54 Fitz, Grancel, 123; 14, 24, 39 3
to the text.
Burroughs, Floyd, 51 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 49 King, Clarence, 43
Flaubert, Gustave, 19 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 54
Cagney, James, 51 Frank, Mary, 22 Kinsey, Darius, 10, 75; 11, 12,
Callahan, Harry, 173, 180, 181, Frank, Robert, frontispiece, 14, 15, 20, 21, 45
Abbott, Berenice, 17, 134, 143;
182, 183, 209; 17, 18, 23, 204, 208, 215, 216, 217; Kirstein, Lincoln, 21, 27, 28, 30,
19, 21, 31, 36, 37, 38,45,
'12 24' 3 34 20, 22, 23, 24, 34, 53, 55, 5
49' 5° Klein, Irwin, 244
Caponigro, Paul, 212; 17, 36, 52 207
Adams, Ansel, 117, 120, 121,
Carson, Rachel, 55 Friedlander, Lee, 24, 241, 242, Klein, William, 219, 224; 23, 25
186; 17, 18, 23, 27, 29, 30,
Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 23, 31, 247; 20, 21, 24, 25, 29, 36, Kootz, Samuel M., 29
1
28'6-> 3 3 34' 3 3 5
36 47' 55 Krause, George, 36
Adams, Henry, 45
Chaplin, Charlie, 48, 49, 50
Adams, Robert, 52
Chappell, Walter, 211 Garbo, Greta, 48 Lachaise, Gaston, 115
Adams, Virginia, 29
Charles, Ezzard, 228 Gardner, Alexander, 31,43 Lang, Fritz, 52
Agee, James, 51, 54
Church, Frederic Edwin, 42 Garnett, William A., 190 Lange, Dorothea, 136, 146,
Alland, Alexander, 21, 44
Cleveland, Grover, 45 Genthe, Arnold, 72; 31, 45 147, 148, 170, 203; 22,
Alvarez Bravo, Manuel, 31,34
1.86'5' Coburn, Alvin Langdon, 91; 45 Gilpin, Laura, 94 2 3 34' 3 3 5 55
Arbus, Diane, 237, 243, 246;
Coolidge, Calvin, 48 Glackens, William, 46 Lartigue, Jacques-Henri, 36
20, 24, 25, 36, 55
Cornell, Joseph, 52 Glover, L. S., 68-69 Laughlin, Clarence John, 175,
Armstrong, Louis, 47
Cosindas, Marie, 36 Grierson, John, 50 179; 18, 52
Armstrong, Neil, 55
Crane, Hart, 50 Griffith, D. W., 49 Lawrence, Jacob and Gwen, 163
Astaire, Fred, 18
Croner, Ted, 218; 23, 34, 53 Gutmann, John, 160; 23, 51 Lawrence, Richard Hoe, 43
Atget, Eugene, 21, 36, 37, 49, 50
Cunningham, Imogen, 111; 31 Lee, Ann, 46
Avedon, Richard, 229, 230; 14,
Cunningham, Merce, 162 Hand, Learned, 25 Lee, Russell, 151; 51
18, 24, 25, 34, 52
Currier, Charles H., 70; 20 Harbutt, Charles, 197 Le Gray, Gustave, 22
Curtis, Edward S., 60; n, 44 Hartley, Marsden, 48 Leigh, Dorian, 21
Balanchine, George, 28
Hayden, Ferdinand Vandeveer, Levinstein, Leon, 223; 23, 35,
Balkin, Serge, 2 1
Daguerre, Louis, 42 43 53
Bardot, Brigitte, 230
Dahl-Wolfe, Louise, 150 Hearst, William Randolph, 49 Levitt, Helen, 19, 157, 159; 23,
Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 26, 27, 28,
8'19. Davidson, Bruce, 37, 226; 36, 53 Hemingway, Ernest, 49 2 3 3 54
62'19> 2 3°' 3 3 33' 3 Leyda,Jay, 29
DeCarava, Roy, 205, 206; 34, 53 Henri, Robert, 46
Barrows, George, 207
De Meyer, Baron Adolf, 126 Herriman, George, 48, 49 Liberman, Alexander, 52
Bartholomew, Ralph, 233
Dickinson, Emily, 42 Heyman, Ken, 36 Lichtenstein, Roy, 54
Baudelaire, Charles, 19
Dos Passos, John, 49 Hill, David Octavius, 27 Liebling, Jerome, 202; 36
Beaton, Cecil, 2 1
Duchamp, Marcel, 45, 46, 52 Hine, Lewis W., 74, 129; 13, 46, Lincoln, Edwin Hale, 66
Bechet, Sidney, 47
8 Duncan, David Douglas, 201 4 Link, O. Winston, 23, 232; 23,
Bellocq, Ernest J., 71; 21, 47
Hitchcock, Alfred, 54 53
Bender, Albert M., 29
Eastman, George, 44 Hoff, Charles, 228 Loeb, Janice, 54
Bennett, Henry Hamilton, 58-
Edgerton, Harold, 165; 31 Horst, 21 Lorentz, Pare, 54
59, 65; 14, 44, 45
Edison, Thomas Alva, 44 Hubbard, Elbert, 47 Luce, Henry R., 51
Bernhardt, Sarah, 49
Eliot, T. S., 49 Luks, George, 46
Bierstadt, Albert, 43
Ellington, Duke, 42 Jackson, William Henry, 43, 52 Lynes, George Piatt, 30, 164,
Bliss, Lillie P., 26
Elliott, Philip, 222 Johns, Jasper, 54 174; 21, 52
Blitzstein, Marc, 164
Engle, Lehman, 164 Johnson, Clifton, 63; 47
Blumenfield, Erwin, 21
Ernst, Max, 19, 52, 177 Johnston, Frances Benjamin, 67; Maloney, Tom, 34
Bolden, Buddy, 47
Erwitt, Elliott, 231, 239; 24, 36 11, 28, 45 Man Ray, 21, 29, 31, 34
Bosquet, Alain, 53
Eugene, Frank, 27 Joffe, Constantin, 21 Marciano, Rocky, 228
Bourke- White, Margaret, 149;
Joyce, James, 48 Matisse, Henri, 15, 26
254 14, 51
 McAlpin, David H., 27, 28, 29,
86'1 3°' 3 33' 35' 3 3
125>
>
5' Melville, Herman, 42
Mencken, H. L., 193
Metzker, Ray K., 36
1 Michals, Duane, 36
75 Mili, Gjon, 168
Model, Lisette, 161; 23, 31, 35,
1 5
Modotti, Tina, 107, 109; 16, 28,
'1 3 49
6'1 Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo, 18, 31, 38
8 Mole, Arthur S., 79; 48
Monk, Thelonious, 42
Monroe, Marilyn, 55
Moore, Charles, 234
Morgan, Barbara, 162; 32, 36
1' Morgan, Willard, 32, 33, 34
Morris, William, 47
Morris, Wright, 152
Morton, Jelly Roll, 47
Munkacsi, Martin, 23
1
>
5>
'7. Muray, Nickolas, 124; 48
6' Murnau, F. W., 50
Mydans, Carl, 51
-8'61.49.
7, Napoleon III, 22
Nathan, George Jean, 193
Negre, Charles, 22
Newhall, Beaumont, 27, 28, 29,
86-2' 3°' 3i. 3 33' 34' 3 3
Newhall, Nancy, 27, 29, 30, 31,
2> 3 33
2
6'3> Newman, Arnold, 163; 31, 38
8' Newton, HenryJ., 43
Niepce, Joseph Nicephore, 42
O'Keeffe, Georgia, 28, 105
Oldenburg, Claes, 54
O'Sullivan, Timothy, 31, 43, 52
Outerbridge, Paul, 122; 24, 48
Parks, Gordon, 199, 235; 22, 54
Penn, Irving, 21, 193, 194, 195;
24' 2 35' 5
Picasso, Pablo, 15, 26, 46, 48
Piffard, Henry G., 43
Poe, Edgar Allan, 42
Porter, Eliot, i8 17' 3i. 34' 55
Post, William B., 57
Pound, Ezra, 49
Pynchon, Thomas, 54
Rau, William H., 64; 14, 21, 24,
39
Rauschenberg, Robert, 210; 25,
35' 54
Rawlings, John, 21
Ray, Nicholas, 54
Rich, James Bartlett, 131
Riis, Jacob, 73; 13, 21, 43, 46
Rockefeller, Mrs. John D., Jr., 26
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 27, 50
Rosenquist, James, 54
Rothstein, Arthur, 51
Runyon, Damon, 51
Ruth, Babe, 48, 124
Salomon, Erich, 23
Sander, August, 34, 36, 55
Schad, Christian, 31
Schamberg, Morton, 46
Schonberg, Arnold, 52
Schultz, Ben, 29
Seeley, George H., 90
Seldes, Gilbert, 48, 49
Shahn, Ben, 51
Sheeler, Charles, 101, 102, 113;
15, 16, 20, 28, 31, 36, 38,
46, 47, 49, 53
Siskind, Aaron, 178, 188, 191;
17, 23, 31, 34, 36
Sladen, Charles Norman, 77; 47
Sloan, John, 46
Smith, Erwin E., 61; 11
Smith, W. Eugene, 196, 200;
22 24' 2 34. 5
Snow, Carmel, 52
Soby, James Thrall, 27, 29, 30,
3
Sommer, Frederick, 176, 177;
17, 18, 19, 31, 34, 52
Steichen, Edward, 13, 16, 81,
82, 85, 96, 104, 125; 11,
12, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 27,
3 33- 34' 35' 3 37' 45'
4
Stein, Gertrude, 49
Steiner, Ralph, 18, 139, 141; 31,
49' 54
Stella, Joseph, 48
Sternberg, Josef von, 50
Stickley, Gustav, 47
Stieglitz, Alfred, 83, 92, 97,
105, 114, 118, 119;
12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
22 24' 2 2 28 3T 3
34' 3 45' 4 49' 9
Strand, Paul, 98, 99, 103, 112,
115, 189; 15, 16, 22, 24,
2 31, 37, 46, 49, 53
Stroheim, Erich von, 50
Stryker, Roy, 51
Sullivan, Mrs. Cornelius J., 26
Swanson, Gloria, 48, 125
Sweeney, James Johnson, 31
Swope,John, 225
Szarkowski, John, 192; 36, 37,
3 39
Talbot, William Henry Fox, 42
Tanguy, Yves, 5 2
Tengle, Frank, 51
Thorn, George, 23
Thomas, John D., 79; 48
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 47
Tugwell, Rexford, 51
Uelsmann, Jerry N., 36
Ulmann, Doris, 95
Van Der Zee, James, 128; 14, 24
Van Dyke, Willard, 32; 28
Vidor, King, 50
Viollet-le-Duc, Eugene, 35
Vreeland, Diana, 52
Vroman, Adam Clark, 62; 21, 44
Warhol, Andy, 25, 54
Watkins, Carleton, 43
Weegee (Arthur Fellig), 20, 166,
167; 14, 17, 18, 23, 24, 31,
5 54
Weiner, Dan, 198, 220; 24, 53
Welles, Orson, 54, 164
11, Weston, Brett, 31, 38
Weston, Charis, 30
Weston, Edward, 33, 35, 106,
108, 110, 116, 153, 184;
16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 28, 30,
3 34' 3 3 47' 4
53
Wheeler, George, 43
Whistler, James McNeill, 11
White, Clarence H., 87, 89, 93;
14, 27, 31, 36, 45
White, Mrs. Clarence H., 89
White, Minor, 185,213517,18,
2 3 5
Whitman, Walt, 54
Wilder, Billy, 52, 54
Williams, William Carlos, 49
Winogrand, Garry, 227, 240,
245; 20, 24, 25, 36, 55
Wolcott, Marion Post, 51
Worden, Willard, 76
Wright, Orville and Wilbur, 45
Trustees of The Museum of Modern Art
As of December 1994
David Rockefeller*
Chairman Emeritus
Mrs. Henry Ives Cobb*
ViceChairman Emeritus
Agnes Gund
Chairman of the Board
Mrs. Frank Y. Larkin
Ronald S. Lauder
Donald B. Marron
Richard E. Salomon
ViceChairmen
John Parkinson III
Treasurer
Lily Auchincloss Mrs. Wolfgang Schoenborn* Committee on Photography
Edward Larrabee Barnes* Mrs. Robert F. Shapiro
Celeste G. Bartos* Mrs. Bertram Smith* John Parkinson III
Sid R. Bass Jerry I. Speyer Chairman
H.R.H. Prinz Franz von Bayern** Joanne M. Stern
Hilary P. Califano Isabel Carter Stewart Robert B. Menschel
Thomas S. Carroll* Mrs. Donald B. Straus* Paul F. Walter
Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Jeanne C. Thayer ViceChairmen
Marshall S. Cogan Paul F. Walter
Douglas S. Cramer Richard S. Zeisler
Ralph Destino Lily Auchincloss
Gianluigi Gabetti * Life Trustee Anne Ehrenkranz
Paul Gottlieb **Honorary Trustee Walter Y. Elisha
Vartan Gregorian Gayle G. Greenhill
Mrs. Melville Wakeman Hall* Agnes Gund*
George Heard Hamilton* Beverly M. Wolff Wendy Larsen
Barbara Jakobson Secretary Jo Carole Lauder
Philip Johnson* Pierre N. Leval
Mrs. Henry R. Kravis Ex Officio Harriette Levine
John L. Loeb* Mark Levine
Robert B. Menschel Rudolph W. Giuliani Peter Norton
Dorothy C. Miller** Mayor of the City of New York Richard E. Oldenburg*
J. Irwin Miller* David Rockefeller*
Mrs. Akio Morita Alan G. Hevesi Christie Calder Salomon
S. I. Newhouse, Jr. Comptrollerof the City of New York Eugene M. Schwartz
Philip S. Niarchos Alan Siegel
James G. Niven Jo Carole Lauder Howard Stein
Richard E. Oldenburg President of The International John C. Waddell
Michael S. Ovitz Council Thomas Walther
Peter G. Peterson Clark B. Winter, Jr.
Gifford Phillips* Barbara Foshay-Miller Lois Zenkel
Emily Rauh Pulitzer Chairman of The Contemporary
David Rockefeller, Jr. Arts Council * Ex Officio
Rodman C. Rockefeller
 Museumof ModernArt

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